The Greater East Asian War:How Japan Changed The WorldBy Kase HideakiSociety for the Dissemination of Historical Facts ©

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Chapter 1 - Up to the Day Japan Surrendered
How the Japanese Army fought"Why did Japan fight a war against the United States?"That is the question I have found myself asking, seventy years from the date Japansurrendered.
Today, most Japanese citizens believe that their country embarked on a reckless war due tothe unbridled aggressiveness of its own military.
It has been said that the Japanese people were deceived by the militarists and got dragged
into the war, but think about this for a moment. Is it really true that the people of Japan
were so foolish?
Japan's victory streak lasted but a mere six months into the war. After Japan's defeat in the
Battle of Midway, Japan was forced onto the defensive, fighting desperately to stymie
America's counterattack.
The American counterattack began on Attu Island, which a whole Japanese garrison dieddefending, in May of 1943. In a series of bloody battles, the US Army captured the islandsof the Pacific Ocean from the Japanese Army.
On every island, the Japanese defenders fought to the point of total annihilation, eventhough they had been completely isolated with no hope of reinforcement.
Japanese garrisons sacrificed themselves on one obscure island after another, starting with
Attu, and then Tarawa, Makin, Kwajalein, Eniwetok, Saipan, Tinian, Guam, Palau, Peleliu,
Angaur, Morotai, and Iwo Jima.
America's official history of the Pacific Theater documents in detail how Japanese soldiersfought. On Attu Island, only 29 men from a Japanese garrison of 2,350 were taken prisoner.
The rest were killed in action, a death rate of 98.8%. Of the 2,571 Japanese defenders of
Tawara, only 8 were taken prisoner, which means that the death rate had risen to 99.7%.
During the Battle of Kwajalein the death rate among the defending garrison of 4,938,
excluding 79 POWs, was 98.4%. Ninety-seven percent of the roughly 30,000 Japanesesoldiers on Saipan fell fighting.
No other army in the annals of world military history has ever shown the same willingness
to fight to the last.
In the training booklet "How the Jap Army Fights," American officers commented that theJapanese fought without fear of death and that "To attempt an estimate of the Japanese2Army is something like attempting to describe the other side of the moon". The "other sideof the moon" remained unseen until after the war when the first man-made probes orbitedthe moon. A British officer also remarked in awe that, "They are the bravest people I haveever met. In our armies, any of them, nearly every Japanese would have had aCongressional Medal of Honor or a Victoria Cross."
It was in October of 1944, when the US Army landed on Leyte Island, the Philippines, thatthe first kamikaze units were formed and sent flying into enemy warships.
By the time Japan surrendered in August of 1945, kamikaze attacks had been carried out
with planes, boats, and submarines.
For a long time I have wanted to know, "Why was Japan the only nation in history to carryout such large-scale suicide attacks?" and "Why did Japanese soldiers fight to the death on
every battlefield?"
By August of 1945, Japan had fought the United States for three years and eight months as
one nation united, but was ultimately defeated.
On July 24, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff ordered Operation Olympic, the invasion of thesouthern half of the island of Kyushu, to commence on November 1.
Operation Olympic was slated to involve 477,400 American soldiers, organized into
fourteen divisions. Supported by a vast number of aircraft carriers, battleships, cruisers, andother warships, they were to transfer from 1,318 transport ships onto landing craft andstorm the beaches at thirty-five predetermined landing sites in southern Kyushu.
Operation Olympic was to be the largest such military operation in history, of even greater
scale than the invasion of Normandy, France, undertaken by the Allies in June of theprevious year.
The United States was at the height of its power, whereas Japan was losing almost all its
capacity to wage war.
The US Joint Chiefs of Staff also decided to launch Operation Coronet, two landings
planned to take place at Kujukuri Beach and Sagami Bay near Tokyo, on March 1, 1946.
The scale of Operation Coronet was planned to greatly exceed even that of Operation
Olympic.
However, on August 15, the Imperial Rescript on the Termination of the War, which
Emperor Hirohito recorded before a microphone the previous day, was broadcast by radio
to the whole nation, officially announcing that Japan had lost the war. Five days before that,the decision to surrender to the Allies and end the war had been made at an Imperial3Conference, a meeting held in the presence of the Emperor, convened at dawn near theEmperor's residence in the Fukiage Gardens of the Imperial Palace.
Seventy years later, in January of 2015, the grounds of the Imperial Palace were opened tothe public and 82,000 loyal subjects gathered at that same place, waving miniature Japanese
flags and shouting banzai.
Even today the Emperor and Empress continue to live on the grounds of the Fukiage
Gardens.
The Emperor's bomb shelters
Let's return now to December of 1941.
With the utmost secrecy, two bomb shelters were constructed in the Fukiage Gardens justafter the start of the war.
One of the two bomb shelters, codenamed the "Imperial Library", was an emergency
evacuation site for the Emperor and Empress in case of an air raid.
About 150 meters to the north of it another such facility, about forty-five square meters insize and comprised of a sitting room and a meeting room, was constructed at the same timeto serve as the site of Imperial Conferences which might need to be convened during air
raids. This one was variously known as the Fukiage Annex, the Imperial Library Annex, or
the Imperial General Headquarters Annex.
The Imperial Library was one story above ground, and to ensure that no bomb howeverstrong could destroy it, it was covered with two layers of concrete, each a meter thick, plus
a meter of sand in between the two.
The Imperial Library was accessible through a hall in the covered entranceway and wascomprised of fifteen rooms, all of them small, which were divided into an east wing andwest wing. On the east wing there was the Emperor's state affairs room, his audience room,
dining room, bedroom, bathroom, and the office of the chamberlains. On the west side there
was the Empress' sitting room, bedroom, wardrobe, bathroom, and the office of theladies-in-waiting.
As an additional safety precaution in case of air raids, an underground bunker known as theImperial Evacuation Site was set up for the Emperor and Empress on the Imperial Library's
second basement floor. The Imperial Evacuation Site included a sitting room about
eighteen square meters in size and a bedroom.
Air raids on Tokyo by B-29 bombers, which commenced following the capture of Saipan
by the US Army on July 6, 1944, forced the Emperor and Empress to move permanently
into the Imperial Library. Whenever an raid-raid warning was issued, the Emperor and4

Empress would transfer to the underground Imperial Evacuation Site until the warning was
lifted.
In May of 1945, while the Japanese garrison on Okinawa was battling an overwhelming
onslaught by the US Army, several thousand people were mobilized from the Imperial
Guard in order to increase bomb resistance on the Fukiage Annex. They carried out the
manual labor, twenty-four hours per day, on a three-shift system.
The work had been undertaken in response to articles circulating in foreign newspapers
which were reporting that the US Air Force had dropped a ten ton bomb on Adolf Hitler's
mountain retreat in Berchtesgaden. Before that the Fukiage Annex had been built towithstand a blast from a bomb only two and a half tons or less.
Both the Imperial Library and the Fukiage Annex had a small warehouse attached to them,but inside of the warehouse was a bicycle fixed in place with its front wheel removed andits back wheel raised off the ground.
In case external power was cut off and the electric generators of their buildings stopped
working, the chamberlains were expected to generate the electricity manually by taking
turns pushing the pedals.
One of the chamberlains who was once given this task told me that during the summer the
air in the dark warehouse was hot and humid. He said that his shabby blue air-raid clothes
were soon dripping with sweat, and on top of that the food situation was so poor that hecouldn't summon the strength to keep pushing the pedals.
Emperor Hirohito's "sacred decision"
On August 9, 1945 at 11:45 PM, just fifteen minutes before August 10, Emperor Hirohito
hung his saber onto the army uniform he had donned as commander-in-chief, and thendescended into the underground passageway on the east end of the hallway of the Imperial
Library.
At the end of the concrete staircase he stepped into a dimly-lit tunnel, just big enough for
one person to pass through at a time. On the floor of the tunnel, boards had been laid down
and at intervals unshaded, yellow light bulbs hung from the ceiling. Ahead, the tunnel
curved leftwards.
The Emperor silently followed his aide-de-camp. Water had collected here, moistening theEmperor's boots as he walked.
At the end of the tunnel they entered a wide corridor encased by white concrete walls. The
Emperor's wet boots left tracks along the parquet flooring.

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They opened a huge steel door, thirty centimeters thick, and right behind it was a wooden
door.
When the Emperor entered the room and sat down in front of a pair of folding screens, eachmade up of six gilded panels, all the assembled attendees bowed deeply towards him. Thenthey seated themselves on desks placed in a semi-rectangular shape directly in front of theEmperor's seat.
This Imperial Conference was the second part of a last meeting of the Supreme Council for
War Guidance, but the military had not been given any indication that the Emperor had
decided to end the war.
The 108 hours that elapsed from the start of this meeting were the final moments of theJapanese Empire during the seventy-eighth year since the Japanese Empire had beenfounded through the Meiji Restoration. Seated on Emperor Hirohito's right were Prime
Minister Suzuki Kantaro, Army Minister Anami Korechika, and Chief of the Army General
Staff Umezu Yoshijiro. Facing these three on the opposite row were President of the Privy
Council Hiranuma Kiichiro, Navy Minister Yonai Mitsumasa, Foreign Minister Togo
Shigenori, and Chief of the Navy General Staff Toyoda Soemu. Seated in the far row were
the secretaries of the liaison conference including Chief of the Military Affairs Bureau
Yoshizumi Masao and Chief Cabinet Secretary Sakomizu Hisatsune.
As the Emperor set down his military cap on the table in front of him, his face trembled
visibly.
Prime Minister Suzuki ordered Sakomizu to read aloud the full text of the Potsdam
Declaration.
Sakomizu stood and began to read the declaration, "Article One - We-the President of theUnited States, the President of the National Government of the Republic of China, and thePrime Minister of Great Britain, representing the hundreds of millions of our countrymen,
have conferred and agree that Japan shall be given an opportunity to end this war." At thatpoint Sakomizu's voice began to whimper and streams of tears poured down the sides of his
cheeks.
Forcing the Emperor to listen to the harsh terms of the Allies' declaration was too much for
him to bear. Throughout the reading he continued to sporadically sniffle and sob.
"Article Two - The prodigious land, sea and air forces of the United States, the British
Empire and of China, many times reinforced by their armies and air fleets from the west,
are poised to strike the final blows upon Japan."
Nevertheless, Sakomizu somehow managed to recite every article of the declaration,
including the demands that, "points in Japanese territory to be designated by the Allies shall6be occupied" and "Japanese sovereignty shall be limited to the islands of Honshu,
Hokkaido, Kyushu, Shikoku and such minor islands as we determine." The Potsdam
Declaration concluded by warning Japan's leaders that their only alternative to acceptancewas "prompt and utter destruction."Once Sakomizu had finished the reading, Suzuki called upon Foreign Minister Togo.
Togo advocated full acceptance of the declaration provided that "the status of His Majesty
the Emperor be guaranteed."
The next man asked to speak was War Minister Anami. "I am opposed to the position of theForeign Minister," he said outright. According to Anami, if the Allies were to land on
Japanese shores, the military would do battle with them on the mainland and would be able
to strike a "decisive blow" against them. Even so, he also argued that Japan should agree topeace with the Allies on the added conditions that they not occupy Japan, allow Japan topunish its war criminals and disarm its troops on its own authority, and preserve the kokutai.
The word kokutai refers to the emperor system.
Next, Yonai and Hiranuma announced their support for Togo's position. Umezu andToyoda were of the same opinion as Anami.
Thus, the conference was split three against three. Everyone waited for Prime Minister
Suzuki to speak.
The elderly, seventy-eight year old prime minister finally stood, with his back hunched, andslowly said, "Today all those present have set out their points of view passionately, but so
far we have not reached a consensus.""However, because postponing this decision any longer would be impermissible, please
permit me to say, with the utmost respect, that at this point I would like to conclude theconference by humbly asking the Emperor what His Majesty's views might be."Suzuki's appeal to Emperor Hirohito to deliver a "sacred decision" at the end of theconference was an act planned out in advance with the Emperor and the Lord Keeper of the
Privy Seal Kido Koichi. Togo was also in on the plan, but the representatives of themilitary were dumbstruck by Suzuki's unprecedented statement.
Not once since Emperor Hirohito had ascended to the throne had he ever given his opinion
on a decision to be made at an official conference.
The Emperor responded, "If that is the case, then I shall give you my opinion. I support theposition of the Foreign Minister."7

Since the start of the war, he said, "It seems that there has been a gap between the promises
and the performance of the Army and Navy... They claim to be confident that they can win
a decisive battle on the mainland, but that is different from the report of the Chief of the
Army General Staff, which says that even the defenses at Kujukuri Beach are not yet ready,and that soldiers are not even being equipped with bayonets... If we fight on the mainlandin such circumstances, what would happen? What would be left of Japan to pass on to ourdescendants?"
Before long everyone was in tears.
The Emperor then said, "Though it will be terribly hard for us to bear, I have resolved tostop the war."
The Emperor lifted his right hand, clad in a white glove, and cleaned off his glasses. Just as
he was wiping the tear lines running down his cheek he added, "You needn't worry
yourselves about me or the imperial family."
By then the attendees of the conference had gone from crying to outright wailing. Somestarted to bawl loudly like children.
It was now 2:20 AM on August 10. Suzuki stood, and while shedding tears he said, "Theconference is over. The conference has concluded in accordance with the present wishes of
His Majesty."
The Japanese government accepted the decision of the Imperial Conference andimmediately sent notification through the governments of Sweden and Switzerland to theUnited States, China, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union that the Potsdam Declaration
would be accepted "with the understanding that it does not include any requirement to alter
the sovereign authority of the Emperor over the state".
The attempted coup d'état
Forty years ago, when I was still in my thirties, I interviewed at length more than one
hundred people who were close to the Emperor during the period starting in January of1945, including imperial family members, aides, politicians, and military leaders. On thebasis of these interviews I put together a non-fiction work concerning how Japan came togrips with the extremely difficult events of the time.
It was just last year, in September 2014, that the Imperial Household Agency released "The
Official Record of the Life of Emperor Hirohito," a massive edited collection of documents
concerning the daily activities of Emperor Hirohito from his birth to his death. The Imperial
Household Agency spent twenty-four years compiling the book.
As I perused "The Official Record of the Life of Emperor Hirohito," I was astonished toread the entry dated August 14, 1945.

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"At 8:58 AM, the Emperor granted an audience in the Imperial Library to Chief of the
Army General Staff Umezu Yoshijiro who reported on his orders to the commander of the
China Expeditionary Army at the time of the Soviet Union's entry into the war. In addition,
Army Minister Anami Korechika had heard the night before of a coup d'état planned by the
Chief of the Military Section of the Army Ministry's Military Affairs Bureau Arao Okikatsu
and five other army officers, and received a detailed operation plan. At 7:00 AM, the Army
Minister and the Chief of the Military Section asked the Chief of the Army General Staff
whether or not he would support a planned coup d'état (Troop Strength Utilization Plan #1)
which would involve forcing their way up to the room beside the Imperial Conference
scheduled to take place that day at 10:00 AM, and then having the Emperor's aide-de-camplead the Emperor into the reception room before detaining everyone else. The Chief of the
Army General Staff condemned them for moving troops in the Imperial Palace andexpressed his strongest possible opposition to their plan."If, at that moment, General Umezu had supported the planned coup d'état, the course ofJapanese history after that would probably have been very different.
If the US Army had gone ahead with its landing and fought through the Japanese mainland,
over ten million Japanese people would have been killed or wounded, and the Soviet Armywould surely have occupied Hokkaido as well. As a result, even the Emperor system would
not likely have survived.
A decisive battle on the mainland?
Now, let's return to the day after Emperor Hirohito handed down his first "sacred decision"
to end the war. In spite of his order to stop the war, that morning’s newspapers across thecountry gave substantial coverage to the message from the Army Minister, that "We shallnot hesitate to fight a holy war to defend the land of the Gods." By then Japan's newspapers
were running only a morning edition due to paper shortages.
In the afternoon, Army Minister Anami was received by the Emperor in the Imperial
Library and told him, "I have grave doubts over whether the kokutai will survive thetermination of the present war. I have sufficient confidence of victory for a war on themainland."It was earlier that year, on April 1, that the US Army landed on Okinawa.
The Imperial General Headquarters had foreseen that if Okinawa were lost, the mainland
would be the US Army's next target, and so the 1st General Army and the 2nd General
Army were constituted in case mainland Japan was split by the enemy attacks. The 1stGeneral Army was in charge of defending the Tokai and Tohoku regions, of eastern andnorthern Japan, whereas the 2nd General Army was in charge of everything from central
Japan down to the southern islands of Kyushu and Shikoku. Hokkaido was placed under theauthority of the Northern District Army.

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Meanwhile, the military was brazenly calling for "one hundred million kamikaze". Thatphrase, "one hundred million kamikaze,” stood out everywhere from the front page of themorning newspapers to the cover of The Housewife's Companion.
The Orders for the Decisive Battle, which were declared by Army Minister Anami in Aprilin preparation for the decisive battle on the mainland, included the following text:"The officers and men of the Imperial Army shall defend the Empire to the death. The
Empire of Japan is the land where the Emperor and the spirits of our ancestors reside. The
soldiers of the Empire should be the vanguard of a nation one hundred million strong. All
one hundred million of us are comrades-in-arms fighting to defend the Empire."
Furthermore, the Instructions for the Battle on the Mainland, which were released the samemonth by the Army Section of the Imperial General Headquarters, included an order to nothesitate to kill Japanese civilians whenever necessary.
"There may be times when the enemy will advance using local residents, women, theelderly, and children as human shields in a bid to crush our morale. If this happens you
should believe that our countrymen value the victory of the Empire more than they do theirown lives and should show no hesitation to destroy the enemy forces."
The government conscripted the entire male population and constituted new divisions
which existed only on paper.
At the time the war ended, military reports indicated that in the 1st General Army's 308th
Division "roughly one out of every five soldiers are equipped with rifles and roughly oneout of every seven are equipped with bayonets." In this division, it was expected that "Forclothing the standard rules apply, but shoes are to be saved for combat operations only andoutside of combat, homemade sandals or similar footwear are to be used."
The military had boasted that it could finish off the enemy in one blow as they were landingon the coastline. In preparation for their landing the military was having all its units acrossJapan work day and night digging cave fortifications.
In May, the newspaper Asahi Shimbun ran an article under the headline, "Even thousandsof tanks cannot stop us! Defenses for our final victory will be unshaken by air or sea
bombardment". According to the article, "Our homeland fortifications have all been dug
deep within the earth. Consequently, even if the enemy ships bombard us day and nightwith their heavy guns, it will do no more than uselessly turn over the soil on the surface.
They will not make even the slightest impact on our underground encampments. The sameis true for enemy bombing."

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The Asahi Shimbun claimed these underground shelters to be "a revolution in strategic
thinking," and concluded its article with the challenge, "Bring it on, American beasts!"
In June, the 36th Army, which was in charge of defending the front line on Kujukuri Beach,reported to the 1st General Army that its inventory of "unit-produced weapons" included
1,500 spears.
It was over the course of that June that the US Army overpowered the last organizedresistance by Japanese units on Okinawa and captured the island. Over 90,000 Japanesesoldiers died in battle and over 100,000 civilians had been killed or wounded during thefighting.
On July 25, the 1st General Army convened a staff officer meeting in Tokyo, attended by
all the chiefs of staff and deputy chiefs of staff of their subordinate area armies, armies, anddivisions.
The Chief of the 1st General Army's General Staff, Lieutenant General Sudo Einosuke,
started off the meeting by emphasizing the need to destroy the enemy on the beaches. Thenthe general staff read aloud the army notice which had been distributed to the attendees inadvance.
"Our concept of the decisive battle is to focus on attacking the enemy's weak points aroundtheir positions on the beaches. Do not hesitate to resolutely press forward your attack. (1.)
The high-ranking officers and general staff do not understand what is at stake in the Greater
East Asian War and have not fought with a will to lay down their own lives. You willremain on the offensive until the final hour. You will attack until the enemy has been
destroyed or until only one man remains standing."
At dawn, on August 12, Japan intercepted a transmission of the Allies' response to Japan's
acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration. It read, "The authority of the Emperor and theJapanese Government to rule the state shall be subject to the Supreme Commander of theAllied Powers." The official text of the Allies' response was wired to Japan shortly after
6:00 PM the same day by Japan's envoy in Switzerland.
Confusion ensued when Japan's Foreign Ministry translated the words "subject to" from theoriginal text to literally mean "restricted by," even though the military had interpreted themto mean "subordinate to". The military insisted that the Potsdam Declaration could not be
accepted until after they had "re-inquired" with the Allies about their answer.
The final Imperial Conference
After receiving the Allies' response, another Imperial Conference, the final one in Japanese
history, was convened in the Fukiage Annex at 11:00 AM on August 14. It was attended by
all the members of the Supreme Council for War Guidance plus the cabinet ministers.

11Forty minutes before the meeting began Hirohito had consulted in the Imperial Library with
Marshal-Admiral Nagano Osami, 1st General Army commander Field Marshal Sugiyama
Hajime, and 2nd General Army commander Field Marshal Hata Shunroku, and asked them
about the prospects of winning a decisive battle on the mainland.
According to "The Official Record of the Life of Emperor Hirohito," Osami and Sugiyama
basically advised him that, "All of our nation's armed forces still have men to spare andmorale is high. Therefore, we must be determined to repulse the US Army as it goesashore." By contrast, Hata told him that, "Unfortunately, I have no confidence that I will beable to repulse the enemy along the defense lines which were put under my charge." Hata
said that Japan had little choice but to accept the Potsdam Declaration.
At 10:30 AM that day, the weather was already hot. The members of the Japanese cabinet,
dressed in a wide array of morning coats, military uniforms, national uniforms, andbusiness suits, each got out of their respective vehicles in front of the eastern entranceway
to the Imperial Library. They lined up and then descended below ground.
The meeting room of the Fukiage Annex was about six meters wide at its entranceway andabout ten meters long from front to back. Three rows of twenty-three chairs had beenplaced on the red carpet in front of the Emperor's seat.
Soon, Emperor Hirohito also entered, just behind his aide-de-camp.
The Emperor placed his military cap down on the table in front of him and then sat down.
The Emperor's face shook slightly with nervousness, though this seemed to only magnify
his divine aura.
Prime Minister Suzuki opened the conference by briefly summarizing to the Emperor thecourse of events since the Imperial Conference of August 9.
"I support the roughly eighty per cent of those at the cabinet meeting who accepted theAllies' response without conditions, but we have not yet achieved unanimity. As a subjectof the Emperor, I know that in this situation it would be a grave sin to again trouble him todeliver his wise counsel, and I apologize deeply. Nevertheless, because this matter is a very
serious one requiring immediate attention, at this meeting we will hear directly from some
opposing voices one more time, and then would be honored if the Emperor would again
take a few minutes of his time to deliver his sacred decision."
After speaking, Suzuki called upon Army Minister Anami.
Anami rose from his seat, but as he started to speak his voice became tearful mid-sentence.
If they ended the war like this, Anami said, there would be no certainty that the kokutai
would be preserved, and therefore they had to ask the Allies to clarify their position. Anami

12believed that, "if even the slightest doubt about this exists, then we should accept
continuation of the war as the least worst option." "The Army has not yet been crushed inbattle," Anami insisted, and thus the odds would be in Japan's favor if the war continued. It
was a fiery speech which he delivered with his flushed cheeks trembling and tears running
down the side of his face.
Anami failed to mention the fact that just that morning at 7:00 he had been at the Army
General Staff Office urging Umezu to detain the Emperor and launch a coup d'état
involving the whole army to ensure that the battle for the mainland would happen.
Emperor Hirohito nodded deeply each time Anami tearfully appealed to him. In due course,
as he watched Anami weeping, the Emperor's eyes also began to well with tears and hepushed back his glasses many times.
After Anami sat down, Suzuki stood again, bowed, and next called on Umezu. Umezu also
made a tearful address reiterating that the Japanese Army was not beaten.
The meeting room was already filled with the noise of sobbing and muttered voices. No
Japanese person can see the Emperor cry without crying himself.
Then, for a moment, their lamentations stopped, though a few continued to blow theirnoses.
Once Umezu had finished, the Chief of the Navy General Staff Toyoda Soemu, who had
been waiting for Suzuki to call his name, rose up from his seat.
Toyoda agreed that the kokutai would not be maintained the way things were. He argued
that they should make an inquiry to the Allies and should fight on if no satisfactory answer
was received.
The three military officers offered no apology for courting disaster. They kept on vainly
repeating their slogans of "least worst option," "land of the Gods," and "sufficientconfidence of victory".
Suzuki finally said, in a slow voice, "We have now heard from the opposing voices."
Emperor Hirohito had been waiting for this moment to speak.
"Since it seems that everyone has had their say, I will now give my opinion. I ask all of you
to respect my decision."
The spacing and intonation in the Emperor's way of speaking were unusual. He spoke in achoppy, discontinuous manner.

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Furthermore, he was crying. From time to time he wiped his cheeks with his glove-cladright hand.
"I fully understand the feelings of the three individuals who have raised objections here
today. I also understand the arguments that they have made. However, my views have notchanged from what I stated earlier. I do not believe that it is feasible to continue the war
any longer... You all seem fearful about whether or not the kokutai will be preserved, but I
think that that is essentially a matter which will depend on the convictions and resolution of
the Japanese people as a whole. Therefore, I think we should accept the Allies' response."
The mournful weeping of those present grew louder.
"For military officers, disarmament and occupation are terribly harsh and unbearable things.
I fully understand your feelings that the people shall sacrifice themselves and die honorable
deaths for the sake of the nation. However, it does not matter what happens to me
personally. I want to save the lives of the people... As long as Japan and the Japanesepeople survive, we can have hope that the country will return to its former glory. Though
this path will probably be a long and difficult one, whenever I think about the people whohave died on the battlefield or those who have tragically perished at home, as well as their
bereaved family, a terrible sorrow comes over me. Alongside my people, I also intend to
strive for that goal."
Suddenly, the Emperor's exclaimed, in a booming voice, "Anami, Anami, I know how you
feel. However, I firmly believe that I can protect the kokutai."
The Emperor appealed to him in a sorrowful tone.
Then, he returned to his previous composure and calmly continued, "Whenever I think
about the future lives of those who were wounded in battle, or whose lives were ravishedby the war, or who lost their family businesses, I cannot contain my sadness. If there isanything I can do for them, I intend to do it."Even Anami sobbed uncontrollably as the Emperor continued to speak.
"If I should address the people directly, then I will personally stand before the microphone.
Today the people don't know about anything that has gone on, so they will surely be shaken
to hear that we have concluded a peace. Our officers and men in the military will be upset
all the more. It will probably be very challenging to pacify them, but I need them tounderstand me. I am ready to do whatever it takes. I will do anything."
By this point some people had fallen from their chairs and were crouching on the floor
crying. It seemed like each man was trying to drown out the next with his sobbing.
The next day at noon, August 15, all the people of Japan gathered in front of their radios.

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The announcer said, "And now there will be an important broadcast. I ask all of ourlisteners from across the country to please rise... His Majesty the Emperor has graciously
offered to personally read an Imperial Rescript to the whole nation. We will now
respectfully transmit to you the voice of the Emperor."Once the announcer had finished speaking, the song Kimigayo began to play solemnly.
The voice of the Emperor, known in Japanese as the "jewel voice," flowed forth from theradios.
"After pondering deeply the general trends of the world and the actual conditions obtaining in
Our Empire today, We have decided to effect a settlement of the present situation..."This was the first time that the people of Japan had heard the voice of the Emperor.
The Emperor's message concluded with, "Cultivate the ways of rectitude, nobility of spirit,
and work with resolution so that you may enhance the innate glory of the Imperial State andkeep pace with the progress of the world. All you, our subjects, we command you to act inaccordance with our wishes." Then there was another mournful playing of Kimigayo.
After this, the announcer spoke again.
"This respectfully concludes the jewel voice broadcast of His Majesty the Emperor... His
Majesty the Emperor has magnanimously sought to establish a great peace for all
generations to come and so had the government announce yesterday to the United States,
Great Britain, China, and the Soviet Union that Japan will accept the Potsdam Declaration...
This unprecedented imperial deed was certainly the wisest possible decision and has caused
all people across Japan to shed tears of gratitude. We loyal subjects must abide by the spiritof the Imperial Rescript and humbly swear to work selflessly to preserve the honor of thenation and maintain the kokutai."

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Chapter 2 - The Trap Laid by the United States
The big lie about the outbreak of the war
Why is it that Japan had to fight the United States?
Today many Japanese people mistakenly believe that the war with the United States wasstarted by Japan or that it was the fault of Japan's out-of-control military.
It is indeed true that if Japan had been unable to restrain its military in August of 1945, thelast summer of the war, then the decisive battle would have been fought on the mainland
and Japan would have been destroyed.
However, in 1941 neither the Japanese government nor the military had any desire to go to
war with the United States. Right up to the final days before the fighting began, they madeevery effort to try to avoid war.
By contrast, the United States had already decided, well before Japan's attack on Pearl
Harbor, on a policy of going to war with and neutralizing Japan.
In spite of this, most people remain convinced that it is Japan, not the United States, thatshould be held responsible for starting the war.
This assertion is utterly contrary to the facts. It is the product of a wildly distorted view ofhistory which was promoted by the United States in the wake of Japan's defeat.
Those who control the history of the past are also able to control the future. After losing the
war Japan became a nation robbed of its own history.
History is memory. People who suffer memory loss are unable to lead normal lives, and thesame holds true for nations.
President Roosevelt's pro-China attitude
The war between Japan and the United States was not inevitable. It was provoked throughAmerican actions.
President Franklin Roosevelt, who prosecuted the war with Japan, entered the White Housein 1933. The year before that, he had run as the Democratic Party's candidate for the US
presidential election in which he trounced incumbent President Herbert Hoover of the
Republican Party. If Roosevelt had not won that fateful election, then there would havebeen no war between Japan and the United States.

16

At that point in time, public opinion in the United States was dominated bynoninterventionist sentiment. Americans had learned a bitter lesson from the disaster ofWorld War I and did not want to get involved in another war in Europe.
America's war-weary determination to not repeat its mistake of intervening in World War I,
which had ended in 1918, continued to exert a powerful influence. The situation was very
reminiscent of the pacifist sentiment now pervading in modern-day Japan.
A major factor behind the war between the United States and Japan was President
Roosevelt's favoritism towards China and ostracism of Japan.
The father of Roosevelt's mother, Sara, had built a huge fortune selling opium in late-Qing
China during the clipper ship era and owned a mansion in Hong Kong. Because of this,Sara spent much of her childhood in Hong Kong and acquired a deep sympathy for the
Chinese.
Roosevelt himself grew up surrounded by the priceless artwork, including temple bells,
folding screens, ivory, and porcelain, which his grandfather had looted from China, andthus came to hold affection for China from a young age. Even after becoming president,
he spoke excitedly about his grandfather's wide-ranging travels across China.
Many Americans also regarded China as being within their sphere of influence.
China had gained America's goodwill both by welcoming in a great number of Christian
missionaries from the United States and due to its highly coveted status as one of theworld's largest marketplaces. Japan, on the other hand, was quite a different situation. Japanwas much smaller as a marketplace, it declined to adapt to Christian culture and instead
maintained its traditional culture, and it refused to act obsequiously to the United States.
The misunderstood China Incident
In 1931, the Manchurian Incident occurred. Manchuria lies beyond the Great Wall andhistorically was the home of the Manchu people, not a part of China. The Manchu people
carried out an invasion and conquest of China by crossing the Great Wall and thus founded
the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912), but during this period they forbade ethnic Han Chinese
from entering Manchuria.
Nevertheless, Roosevelt viewed the Manchurian Incident as a Japanese invasion of China.
In 1935, as tensions in Europe mounted, the US Congress enacted the Neutrality Act, which
had been passed with the support of the ruling Democratic Party under pressure from public
opinion. The Neutrality Act banned the export of weapons and war materials to any
countries at war, including civil war.

17

In January of 1932, the year following the Manchurian Incident, the Shanghai Incident
broke out. Japan dispatched troops to Shanghai, but in May, a ceasefire agreement wasreached and Japan's expeditionary army withdrew.
In July of 1937, Japanese and Chinese soldiers clashed near Marco Polo Bridge in theoutskirts of Beijing. The so-called "Marco Polo Bridge Incident" is now known to havebeen a provocation set in motion by the Chinese Communist Party. Since the Boxer
Rebellion of 1900, a variety of nations, including Japan, Great Britain, and France, had theright to station soldiers on Chinese soil in order to protect their citizens there.
The Battle of Shanghai began the following month. At that point, Japan had a naval landing
party of only 3,000 soldiers stationed in the city's Japanese concession.
This small force was suddenly attacked by a 400,000-man Chinese army unit. Zhang
Zhizhong, the army group commander, later admitted in his memoirs that he was a secretagent of the Chinese Communist Party. Because the Soviet Union was afraid of having tofight Japan, the Soviets instigated the Chinese Communist Party to provoke a conflict
between China and Japan.
The Japanese Army in China received reinforcements as the fighting extended across the
Chinese mainland.
Roosevelt falsely portrayed both the Marco Polo Bridge Incident and the Battle of Shanghai
as being planned acts of aggression by Japan against China.
However, Japan did not start the China Incident.
After the war, the China Incident became known as the Second Sino-Japanese War, despite
the fact that neither side declared war on the other until after the outbreak of the war
between the United States and Japan in 1941. The conflict should more appropriately bereferred to as an "incident."
Volunteer servicemen deployed in China
Even though Japan had done no harm whatsoever to the United States, the Roosevelt
administration viewed Japan as an enemy.
Still, because the United States was a neutral power, President Roosevelt was not able toassist any belligerent power directly. Instead, he encouraged private civilians to form the
China Aid Council, which provided a considerable amount of funds to Chiang Kai-shek's
government with which to fight Japan. The Roosevelt administration had financial aid,
weaponry, and war materials pumped into China in great quantities.
Because Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his wife Soong May-ling were Christians,
many Americans viewed the war as an invasion of Christian China by heathen Japan.

18In order to manipulate American public opinion, Chiang's regime regularly bought
influence among American journalists, university scholars, and researchers.
In 1937, Chiang's regime also hired Captain Claire Chennault of the United States Army
Air Corps as a highly paid military advisor. The following year, Chennault was made acolonel and was appointed Chief of Staff of the Republic of China Air Force.
Chennault submitted a plan to the Roosevelt administration to send fighters and active duty
US Air Corps pilots to China under the guise of being a "volunteer group." President
Roosevelt approved this idea on the spot.
This, however, was a serious violation of international laws. Chennault's air corps was
dubbed the "Flying Tigers". The United States supplied their fighter planes, which each had
the image of a shark's face painted on its nose cone and the "white sun, blue sky" emblem
of Nationalist China marked on its wings. The Flying Tigers, piloted by American"volunteers", made big headlines in the United States.
In July of 1939, the Roosevelt administration notified Japan that it had decided to notrenew the Treaty of Commerce and Navigation which was set to expire in January of next
year. Japan and the United States had signed the Treaty of Commerce and Navigation in
1911.
It was also in July that the United States imposed a restrictive licensing system on theexport of oil and scrap iron to Japan and prohibited the export of aircraft fuel.
The Second World War began in September with the invasion of Poland by Hitler'sGermany. The United States immediately declared its neutrality.
President Roosevelt made a radio address in which he stated, "I hope the United States willkeep out of this war... As long as it remains within my power to prevent, there will be no
blackout of peace in the United States."
In October, an American military code-breaking team succeeded in decrypting Japan's
diplomatic code. It referred to the diplomatic code as the "Purple Code" and called its
cipher machine the "Purple Machine.”
The United States was thus able to gradually learn all the Japanese government's secrets.
In December, the Roosevelt administration added aluminum, which is indispensable for the
manufacture of aircraft, to the list of items prohibited from export to Japan, as well as
magnesium, molybdenum, and any technical information or designs to be used in aircraft
fuel plants or for the production of aircraft fuel.

19

President Roosevelt's most trusted advisor was his Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau.
Exactly one year prior to the outbreak of war between the United States and Japan,
December 7, 1940, Morgenthau wrote in his diary that he had told President Roosevelt theyshould hand China "some long-range bombers with the understanding that they were to be
used to bomb Tokyo and other Japanese cities," and Roosevelt responded that, "it would bea nice thing if the Chinese would bomb Japan." A plan to launch a surprise bombing strikeon the Japanese mainland, entitled "JB-355," was drawn up by the Joint Army-Navy Board.
The Treaty of Commerce and Navigation had lapsed in January 1940, and Japan ultimately
lost most of its foreign trade. On May 15, President Roosevelt officially ordered that plan
"JB-355" be submitted to the armed forces. According to the plan, the United States would
transfer bombers to China and would disguise them as Chinese planes by painting theemblem of Nationalist China on their fuselages. After finding American "volunteers" topilot them, they would take off from Chinese airbases and launch bombing raids against
Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka, Kyoto, and Kobe.
The Joint Army-Navy Board was making detailed preparations to put the plan to bomb theJapanese mainland into action.
The now declassified planning document states that their objective would be the"destruction of Japanese factories in order to cripple munitions and essential articles formaintenance of economic structure in Japan." In other words, their objective was to destroy
the Japanese economy.
It was decided that the bombers to be used to strike Japan would be the new Boeing B-17.
These massive bombers, which were known as "flying fortresses," had four engines and aflight range of 3,300 kilometers.
The top-secret Special Research Division
In June 1940, France surrendered and the German Army swept across the European
continent. From that moment, Great Britain was forced to fight the war alone.
Roosevelt strongly hoped to have the United States participate in the war in Europe to save
Great Britain, but America's prevailing noninterventionist sentiment proved to be an
insurmountable barrier.
That is the reason why Roosevelt schemed to quickly force Japan into a war with theUnited States, thereby entering the war in Europe "through the back door."
In February 1941, the Roosevelt administration secretly established the Division of Special
Research within the State Department in order to investigate the question of how the UnitedStates would deal with Japan after defeating it in war. This occurred nine months prior to
the attack on Pearl Harbor.

20

Within the US government, this division was simply known by the acronym "SR".
During the 1960's and 1970's, I went to the United States to interview members of the US
occupation regime in Japan and many wartime government leaders. That was how I firstlearned about the existence of SR.
After the outbreak of the war between Japan and the United States, the US Army beganparticipation in the State Department's Division of Special Researchand it became theAdvisory Committee on Postwar Foreign Policy.
In March 1944, a report was completed which included the recommendation that the UnitedStates authorities leave the Emperor on the throne during their occupation in order to use
him for their own ends and retain the Japanese government so that they could ruleindirectly.
They also planned to have the United States recognized as the sole power occupying Japanand to carry out a thorough demilitarization and "democratization" of Japanese society.
After this, they would sign a peace treaty which would grant Japan nominal independence
while ensuring that Japan would be effectively under America's thumb.
SR was also given the task of producing a draft peace treaty.
After Japan’s defeat, the subsequent occupation went exactly according to the plans that
had been drawn up by the Postwar Foreign Policy Committee.
In its first draft of the peace treaty with Japan, Japan was permanently forbidden frommaintaining any military capacity. Elaborate safeguards were to be put in place after that toensure that Japan would never be able to rebuild its military strength.
Japan would not be permitted to have a single aircraft, which included not just military
aircraft but even civilian ones. Among many other things, Japan was also completely
prohibited from stockpiling strategic materials, undertaking military research, andresearching the peaceful use of nuclear power.
Even after the peace treaty was signed, some of the highest-ranking Japanese who were
purged during the occupation were to be permanently banned from public service in Japan.
However, merely binding Japan by a treaty did not set their minds at ease, so they also
mandated international inspectors to monitor all Japanese territory for twenty-five years
from the signing of the treaty in order to ensure that Japan had not acquired any capacity to
produce armaments or war material.

21

This first draft of the peace treaty was far harsher than even the Treaty of Versailles forced
upon Germany after World War I. General MacArthur, the Supreme Commander for the
Allied Powers, was ordered to impose a new constitution on Japan using this draft as its
model.
A sneak attack that hoodwinked even the American people
Thus, Japan's current constitution can barely be called a "constitution" at all. Rather, it is anunequal treaty in the guise of a constitution.
Let's return to 1941. Negotiations between Japan and the United States commenced with ameeting in April between Nomura Kichisaburo, the Japanese ambassador to the US, andCordell Hull, the US Secretary of State, at Hull's private residence in Washington, DC.
Nomura spoke with Hull again on April 16. In May alone Nomura met with him on May 2,
7, 11, 13, 14, 16, 20, 21, and 28, but of course no notable progress was made.
President Roosevelt is recorded as telling his advisor, "I think I can baby them [theJapanese] along for three months." In other words, Roosevelt was not negotiating in goodfaith.
On July 18, after the US Army and US Navy had jointly signed the plan to bomb theJapanese mainland, "JB-355," it was handed back to President Roosevelt, who approved theplan that same day.
This was five months before a Japanese task force struck Pearl Harbor.
Today, the documents which President Roosevelt signed, approving a surprise air strike on
the Japanese mainland, have been declassified.
The plan was for the United States to supply 150 B-17 bombers and 350 fighter planes to
Chiang Kai-shek by October 1, which were to be launched from Chinese airbases andattack Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, and industrial areas of Tokyo and Yokohama.
By organizing a sneak attack on Japan, the Roosevelt administration was deceiving theAmerican people.
In July, after obtaining the permission of French authorities, Japan stationed troops in thesouthern half of French Indochina, modern-day Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
The United States and Great Britain had been using French Indochina as a conduit totransport large quantities of weaponry to Chiang's government. Japan had troops stationed
in northern French Indochina since August of the previous year with the permission of theFrench government in order to cut off Chiang's supply lines.

22

Today, many experts believe that Japan's forcible occupation of southern French Indochina
on July 28 was the trigger that set off the war between the USA and Japan.
And yet, President Roosevelt had already approved a plan to bomb the Japanese mainland
ten days before that.
Even so, Roosevelt's surprise air strike was never put into action. The war in Europe wasreaching a critical stage and, because large-sized bombers had to be quickly dispatched toGreat Britain, it was too late for the US to deliver them to China.
Even now, most Americans believe that the attack on Pearl Harbor was a despicable sneak
attack, but this propaganda was itself a “sneak attack” on the American people.
Economic sanctions that throttled Japan
In August, the US government froze Japanese assets within the United States and imposeda total trade embargo on Japan for all strategic materials, including petroleum. At that time,
Japan had only two years' worth of petroleum reserves, including petroleum for civilian
use.
Japan was dependent on the United States for petroleum imports. At that time, the UnitedStates was the world's largest producer of petroleum. For Japan's armed forces, their fuelsupplies drained lower and lower with each passing day. Without a supply of petroleum,
Japan's whole economy began to seize up. America was tightening its noose around Japanin the hopes of forcing Japan to fire the first shot.
After General MacArthur had been removed by President Truman as commander of theUnited States Army Forces in the Far East and returned to the United States, he testified on
May 3, 1951 to the US Senate Joint Committee on Armed Services and Foreign Relations
that, due to the US economic embargo, Japan had been left with no choice but to go to war
in its own self-defense.
Because Japan was then under US occupation, MacArthur's testimony was never reported
in Japan.
MacArthur mentioned that the United States had embargoed the export of raw material to
Japan, including the petroleum and scrap iron that are essential in industrial nations, andstated that, "They [The Japanese] feared that if those supplies were cut off, there would be
10 to 12 million people unoccupied in Japan. Their purpose, therefore, in going to war waslargely dictated by security."At the time that Japan entered into negotiations with the United States, US-Japan relations
were deteriorating, but no one in the Japanese military was yet thinking seriously about
going to war. Naturally, the military also had strong expectations that the negotiations
would succeed.

23

An unexpected war
Japan was not at all prepared for a war with the United States.
If the war was to involve the United States, Great Britain, and the Netherlands, then theircolonies in Southeast Asia would of course become battlefields.
Up to that point, the Japanese armed forces had not expected to fight in either the Asiancolonies of the Western powers or the islands of the South Pacific. Judging from Japan's
national strength, they would not have been able to plan for this sort of war.
If the Japanese had been planning to go to war with the United States from an early date,surely they would have fortified the islands which they had received as mandates afterWorld War I, such as Saipan, Tinian, and Truk.
However, Japan erected no fortifications on its South Pacific island territories until 1944,
long after the start of the war.
It was expected that if Japan had spent enough time building defense works on these islands,
they would not have fallen to the United States in such a short period of time. Japan's
soldiers would have been able to put up much more dogged resistance in the face of theAmerican attack.
The Japanese Army was also thoroughly unprepared for military operations in southern
Asia.
The Japanese Army did not start planning its invasions of the Malay Peninsula, thePhilippines, Burma (modern-day Myanmar), and the Dutch East Indies until March 1941,
nine months before the war began. For the Japanese Navy, planning did not begin until amere four months before the war began.
Until then, the Japanese Army had never undertaken any training for jungle warfare.
At the time Japan decided to go to war, its military did not have any of the detailed maps
which were always prepared in advance for the territories it would invade, nor did it haveany of the military geography booklets which looked into things like the climate and local
customs of the territories in question.
Japan lacked the necessary preparations for this kind of war. The Army was only ready tofight its acknowledged archrival, the Soviet Union, and the Navy was only expecting adecisive sea battle with the US Navy, similar to the Battle of Tsushima in 1905.
Because of this, by December 1941, Japan had only a very vague idea of how to end thewar. The Japanese military hoped that after it had won the first stage of the war it could

24fortify its newly occupied territories and construct an invincible defensive position, thus
forcing the United States to eventually lose its will to fight and sue for peace.
Roosevelt's ploy
President Roosevelt had already decided on going to war with Japan, and for this reason hedid not desire to reach a settlement through diplomacy.
By contrast, the Japanese government believed that the United States wanted peace as much
as Japan and wanted to ease the mounting tensions between the two countries.
The Japanese had no doubt in their minds that America was as sincere as Japan.
Thus, Japan played right into America's hands. It fell for the Roosevelt administration's
ploy, was driven to a precipice, and was forced to choose war.
Japan's government and military were being made to dance to America's tune, with noknowledge that the Roosevelt administration's real intention was to force Japan to go to war
with America.
On November 3, Joseph Grew, the US ambassador to Japan, reported to the State
Department from Tokyo that, if US-Japan relations were not improved, "This would lead towhat I have described as an all-out, do-or-die attempt, actually risking national hara-kiri, tomake Japan impervious to economic embargoes abroad rather than to yield to foreignpressure. It is realized by observers who feel Japanese national temper and psychology
from day-to-day that, beyond peradventure, this contingency not only is possible but isprobable."
On November 25, twelve days before the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt met
in the White House with a group consisting of Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Secretary of
War Henry Stimson, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, Army Chief of Staff George
Marshall, and Chief of Naval Operations Harold Stark. They agreed that, "The question
was how we should maneuver them [the Japanese] into the position of firing the first shot
without allowing too much danger to ourselves."
Then, on November 26, the United States confronted Japan with the Hull Note, which
completely overturned everything that had been agreed upon through negotiation up to thatpoint.
Today, historians agree that the United States delivered the Hull Note to Japan in fullknowledge that Japan would never accept its terms.
Ambassadors Nomura Kichisaburo and Kurusu Saburo strongly objected to the note
immediately after they had received and read it in Washington, DC. They said, "We areunsure whether or not we should pass this proposal to our nation's government without

25

alteration. It includes terms which could never be accepted." Ambassador Grew read the
Hull Note at the US Embassy in Tokyo and later commented in his diary that, "It was the
document that touched the button that started the war."
The strongest advocate for peace in Tojo Hideki's cabinet was Foreign Minister Togo
Shigenori. He later recalled that the moment he received the Hull Note, "I was struck by an
overwhelming despair."In spite of Togo's adherence to the pro-peace faction within the Japanese government, after
the war he would be incarcerated as a Class A war criminal and would die of illness inprison. Togo was an ethnic Korean who was born in Kagoshima. In Japan's family registry
his name is listed as "Pak Mudok." It was only after he passed the entrance exam of the
Law Department of Tokyo Imperial University (now the University of Tokyo) that hechanged his last name to the Japanese name Togo.
In his memoirs, which he wrote in prison, Togo states, "Because Japan's very existence wasbeing threatened by both the US-instigated economic embargo and a military encirclementthat grew stronger by the day, there was already nothing Japan could do but rise up... I haveno doubt that Japan's position after accepting the Hull Note would have not been muchdifferent from our current position after being defeated in war."
Radhabinod Pal, the justice representing India in the International Military Tribunal for the
Far East, is famous for submitting a dissenting judgment declaring all twenty-eight of theso-called "Class A war criminals" on trial to be innocent.
Pal strongly denounced the tone of the Hull Note, writing in his judgment that, "as for thepresent war, the Principality of Monaco, the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, would havetaken up arms against the United States on receipt of such a note as the State Department
sent the Japanese Government on the eve of Pearl Harbor."
Pearl Harbor: The Final Act
In the early morning of December 7 (Hawaii local time), six Japanese aircraft carriers
approached within two hundred miles north of Pearl Harbor. Their crews, lined up on bothsides of the flight deck, cheered as the 183 planes of the first attack wave took off from thecarriers, one by one, bound for Pearl Harbor.
The attack on Pearl Harbor ended a long exercise in futility on Japan's part. Between
February 11, when Ambassador Nomura took up his post in Washington, and December 7,
Nomura had met with President Roosevelt ten times and Secretary of State Hull sixty times.
Roosevelt and Hull were only pretending to negotiate with Japan in good faith.
Concerning December 7, Secretary of War Stimson wrote that, "When the news first camethat Japan had attacked us my first feeling was of relief... This continued to be mydominant feeling in spite of the news of catastrophes which quickly developed."

26

Roosevelt had deliberately provoked Japan to attack the United States, and succeeded inforcing Japan into committing suicide. The attack on Pearl Harbor was the final act in a
puppet play, and Roosevelt was the puppet master.
In Japan, on December 8 at 6:00 AM (Japan time), a special news bulletin was broadcast byradio declaring that a state of war existed with the United States and Great Britain.
The announcer said, "We now give you a special news bulletin," and this was followed by
the brief message, "Joint Army-Navy Announcement from the Imperial General
Headquarters: The armed forces of the Empire of Japan entered a state of hostilities with
the US and British Armies in the western Pacific before dawn on December 8."
That night, at 7:00 PM, Prime Minister Tojo Hideki invited eighteen military and politicalleaders to the dining room of his official residence for supper, including Chief of the Army
General Staff Sugiyama, Chief of the Navy General Staff Nagano, Navy Minister Shimada
Shigetaro, and Chief Cabinet Secretary Hoshino Naoki. The kitchen staff prepared Chinese
food for them.
At the meeting, as soon as the Navy reported on the Pearl Harbor raid, Prime Minister Tojo
beamed with joy and declared excitedly that, "This has greatly exceeded our expectations.
Now even Roosevelt will finally fall from power."
Then Sugiyama added, "A little while ago, I paid a visit to Iwashimizu Hachiman Shrine
and prayed that we would see this war through to its end without needing the help of thedivine wind of the Gods."
Lindbergh's diary
Even at the time, there were people in the United States who believed that President
Roosevelt had forced the war upon Japan. One of them was Charles Lindbergh, who had
become an American national hero in 1927 for piloting his airplane, the Spirit of St. Louis,on the world's first transatlantic flight.
The day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Lindbergh wrote in his diary, "I am not surprisedthat the Japs attacked. We have been prodding them into war for weeks. They have simply
beaten us to the gun."
Herbert Hoover, Roosevelt's predecessor as president of the United States, wrote thefollowing in his memoirs, "Freedom Betrayed," about a discussion he had with MacArthurin 1946 during a trip to occupied Japan:"I talked with General Douglas MacArthur alone for three hours on the evening of May 4th,
for one hour on the evening of May 5th, and for one hour on the morning of the 6th... I said
that the whole Japanese war was a madman's desire to get into war. He agreed and also27

agreed that the financial sanctions in July 1941 were not only provocative but that Japanwas bound to fight even if it were suicide unless they could be removed... The giganticerror in Roosevelt's statesmanship was the total economic sanctions on Japan... The
sanctions were war in every essence except shooting. Roosevelt had been warned time andagain by his own officials that such provocation would sooner or later being reprisals of
war."

28

Chapter 3 - The Greater East Asia Conference and the Dream of
Racial Equality
The abolition of the humiliating unequal treaties
At the beginning of 1942, the year following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the majority of theworld was still under white colonial rule.
Race was the primary factor dividing humanity into those who ruled and those who wereruled. A person's value was determined by the color of his skin.
Since the middle of the nineteenth century, as Japan was opening up to the world following
a prolonged period of isolation, the Japanese people had two great aspirations.
The first of these was the abolition of the unequal treaties. In 1853, US Commodore
Matthew C. Perry’s fleet forced its way into Tokyo Bay, and Perry ordered that Japan's
ruling Tokugawa shogunate comply with his demands. Japan was compelled to sign
humiliating unequal treaties with the United States and a variety of European nations.
In accordance with the unequal treaties, foreign troops were stationed at "open ports"
throughout Japan including Yokohama and Kobe. The Western powers controlled exports
and imports, set tariff rates, and established their own courts. Japan had no right to put any
white man on trial. Thus, Japan was virtually a vassal state.
Today, when court banquets are held at the Imperial Palace for guests visiting from foreign
nations, French food is served.
And yet, in China, foreign dignitaries are served Chinese food, just as in Korea they areserved Korean food, in Thailand they are served Thai food, and in India they are served
Indian food.
So why is it that Japan adopted French cooking?
At the start of the Meiji period (1868-1912), when Japan was still groaning under theweight of the unequal treaties imposed by Western nations, it was thought that Western
civilization was the only true civilization, and that all other cultures were uncivilized. Inorder to revise the unequal treaties, Japan had to prove that it was a civilized nation bylearning the customs, lifestyles, and the advanced civilization of the West.
For this reason, Japan constructed Rokumei Hall, which today stands beside the Imperial
Hotel in front of Tokyo's Hibiya Park. During the Meiji period high-ranking Japanese
officials, along with their wives and daughters, dressed in Western clothing and invited29

foreign dignitaries residing in Tokyo to Rokumei Hall for Western-style banquets andcostume balls.
Today, black clothing is always worn at Japanese funerals, but until the start of the Meiji
period, white clothing was the accepted norm. The Meiji government issued a nationwide
notice asking citizens to wear black clothing at funerals because Western nations wouldview white clothing at funerals as being a mark of an uncivilized society.
Official orders remain in effect across Japan, issued by the Ministry of Education at the
beginning of the Meiji period, which ban girls’ school students from urinating outdoors theway that men do.
It is not customary in either Korea or China for women to urinate outdoors. I spent myyouth in Nagano Prefecture and used to see women urinate in the rice and vegetable fields.
When I visited the island of Java in Indonesia, I saw a woman urinating while standing on afootpath between two rice paddies. That, together with the smell of rice wafting through theair, filled me with a surprising feeling of nostalgia.
A proposal for racial equality spurned by the white powers
The Japanese people's other great aspiration was to build a world based on the principle ofracial equality.
Since the middle of the nineteenth century, many Japanese samurai visited Europe and theUnited States, and during their travels they were angered to see the way that white-skinned
people exploited their fellow colored citizens, as if they were work animals or slaves.
The last unequal treaty was finally abolished following Japan's victory in the
Russo-Japanese War. The Japanese succeeded at becoming the only nonwhite race to join
the Great Powers club, which up to then had been restricted only to whites. Now that Japan
was a great power, discrimination based on race could no longer continue.
From then on, the Japanese people never gave up their dream of global racial equality.
Japan repeatedly pleaded for the abolition of racial discrimination, only to be turned downby the United States and the European powers.
In 1919, when the Charter of the League of Nations was being drafted at the Versailles
Peace Conference convened in Paris after World War I, the Japanese plenipotentiaries
proposed the inclusion of the principle of racial equality. The people of Japan were
devastated when this proposal was killed due to opposition from the white colonial powers,
including the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Netherlands.
Smaller European nations like Serbia had cast their votes in support of Japan's proposal, butjust when it had been adopted by majority vote, the chairman of the conference, US
President Woodrow Wilson, vetoed it, for the bizarre reason that "Such a significant

30

measure should require unanimity." At the time, the United States held the Philippines as acolony and discriminated against its own African-American population.
The invasion of Africa by European powers was ongoing at the time, and lasted well into
the twentieth century.
In 1900, Great Britain conquered Kumasi, the capital of the West African Ashanti Empire(in modern-day Ghana), and then in 1903 conquered the Sokoto Caliphate in northwestern
Nigeria. In addition, France subjugated Morocco in 1912, and the next year Great Britain
assumed control of Egypt.
In 1935, Italy invaded the Kingdom of Ethiopia, an independent African nation with over
2,000 years of history and reputed to have been the world's oldest kingdom. The EthiopianArmy, armed with spears and axes, fought boldly but was no match for the Italians. The
following year, the king fled into exile in London, and Ethiopia was incorporated into Italy.
During and before World War II, the people of Asia, African-Americans, and the aboriginal
peoples of Australia and New Zealand all looked up to Japan as a shining beacon. The
many memoirs and recollections recorded during this time provide ample testimony of how
greatly they longed for Japanese victory against the United States, Great Britain, and theNetherlands.
From Asia to Africa and the Americas, the colored peoples of the world had had theirdignity as human beings robbed for hundreds of years by a world order dominated bywhites--until Japan's participation in World War II.
The Japanese Army, the beacon of hope for the nonwhite people of the world
The Japanese Army made spectacular advances in the early stages of the war.
Upon the outbreak of the war in 1941, the Japanese Army immediately captured Hong
Kong, Great Britain's "Pearl of the Orient," and by May 1942, occupied in succession the
British colonies of Malaya, Singapore, and Burma, Dutch-ruled Indonesia, and US-ruled
Philippines.
The peoples who were degraded due to the color of their skin and who had been forced into
misery were freed from their chains by Japan, and finally given new hope for the future.
The leaders of the United States, the British Empire, Australia, and other white nations
were taken aback by this mass awakening of the oppressed colored peoples of the world.
They greatly intensified their crackdown on activists, but at the same time, panic compelledthem to mitigate some of their racist practices in the hopes of placating other coloredpeople.

31

For white people, the Japanese Army’s campaign was a truly staggering event that shattered
their centuries-long domination of the world.
By contrast, the Japanese saw the people of Asia as "brothers". In the territories cleared ofwhite rule, Japanese soldiers expressed sincere sympathy for their fellow Asians and, quite
unlike whites, treated them as equals.
The memoirs and recollections of contemporary Asians and African-Americans praise
Japan for bravely standing up for them, whereas the Chinese of the time are seen as
self-serving and sycophantic towards white nations.
Until Japan's defeat in 1945, the Westerners who ruled over Asia and Africa were called"white devils", and young people in Japan dreamed of liberating Asia from Western
oppression. Such was the spirit of the times.
Everywhere Japan liberated, this spirit resonated with the local people's aspirations forindependence. Independence movements rapidly gathered strength across Asia.
However, Japan's gains did not last long.
In June 1942, seven months from the start of the war, the Japanese Navy suffered adevastating defeat at the Battle of Midway and lost its main task force.
In August 1942, the United States began its counteroffensive by landing 19,000 Marines on
Guadalcanal in the southwestern Pacific. Japanese army and naval landing units totaling
4,800 men were hurriedly dispatched, but they failed to retake the island. On two occasions,
two Japanese divisions were committed to the fight, but they sustained heavy losses fromwithering American firepower and withdrew in February of the following year.
In May 1943, during the US Army's vigorous counterattack, a whole Japanese garrison
fought to the death defending Attu Island in the Aleutians. In November, the US Armylanded on Tarawa and Makin in the Gilbert Islands.
The Greater East Asia Conference: Leaders of the non-white races unite
In October, just as the leaves of the ginkgo trees surrounding the Imperial Diet Building(now the National Diet Building) were changing color with the oncoming fall, the leaders
who would attend the Greater East Asia Conference arrived in Tokyo.
As the war was about to enter its third year, the Greater East Asia Conference wasconvened in order to declare to the world, and to future generations, Japan's purpose infighting the war.
The conference began on November 5 in the Imperial Diet Building. Gathered together in
one room were Japanese Prime Minister Tojo Hideki, Premier of the Republic of China

32

Wang Jingwei, Representative of the Kingdom of Thailand Prime Minister His Majesty
Wan Waithayakon, Manchukuo Prime Minister Zhang Jinghui, the President of thePhilippines Jose Laurel, Prime Minister of Burma Ba Maw, and Representative of theProvisional Government of Free India Subhas Chandra Bose.
Japan had granted independence to Burma in August of that year, and to the Philippines in
October.
The Greater East Asia Conference was a historic summit, bringing together the leaders of
the world's nonwhite nations for the first time in human history.
Indonesia had been a colony of the Netherlands, as the Dutch East Indies, but underJapanese rule, steady progress was made to prepare Indonesia for independence. Japandeveloped Indonesia's educational and administrative systems and trained its future nationalarmy.
At the Greater East Asia Conference, each Asian leader delivered a speech. Wang Jingwei,
in his speech, quoted the words of Sun Yat-sen, the revered founding father of the Republicof China:
Just three months before he passed away, our founding father Dr. Sun Yat-sen said, 'Fora hundred years, our Asia had been invaded by Britain and the United States and entereda period of decline. Most Asian nations lost their status as independent states. However,at the moment of our darkest hour, we suddenly arrived at a turning point. This turning
point was Japan's Meiji Restoration, which allowed Japan to become an Asian great
power. This was the starting point of Asia's revival. Every nation in Asia must work withthe great power Japan as one mind and body. We must do away with hegemonic
Western civilization and, by completely driving out the invasive Anglo-American
powers, complete the restoration of sovereignty to the nations of Asia.
Dr. Sun explained that, 'Japan and China are like brothers. Japan once also struggled
under the shackles of the unequal treaties, but Japan was the first to throw off thoseshackles and become an Asian great power. Today China is seeking to abolish its
unequal treaties just as Japan once was. We earnestly desire that Japan provide us with
ample support in our endeavor.
In January, 1944 Japan became the first nation in the world to return its concessions to
China and repeal extraterritoriality.
Jose Laurel declared that, "In fact, as I look back, Your Excellency, and recall the history ofhuman civilization, I feel that this meeting of the peoples of Greater East Asia should havebeen held a long time ago. Whereas, in the past we have been kept as strangers, one and all,it is really gratifying to note that through the trying efforts of the great Empire of Japan, forthe first time in history we are gathered and grouped together, never again to be separated33

as in the past, ready to fight oppression, exploitation and tyranny so that we may proclaim
to the world that, no longer shall the one billion peoples of Asia be subjected to dominationand exploitation by a few Western Powers."
The Philippines became Spanish territory in 1571. In 1898 the United States launched asudden attack on the Spanish colony of Cuba and, during the resulting Spanish-American
War, seized the Philippines from Spain.
After ridding themselves of the Spanish, the Filipino people demanded independence andclashed with the US Army. A constituent assembly was convened which declared the
independence of the Philippine Republic. Its first president was Emilio Aguinaldo, who had
led the pro-independence campaign since the time of Spanish rule.
When the Japanese Army invaded the Philippines, General Aguinaldo welcomed theJapanese as liberators and worked with them.
From 1898, the Filipino Army fought against the US Army, but was ultimately defeated.
The Philippines was reduced to the status of an American colony. During this period, morethan 500,000 Filipino people were massacred.
Burma was invaded by Great Britain three times, in 1824, 1852, and 1885. In 1886, Burma
was made a British colony.
Prime Minister Ba Maw of Burma was overcome by a surge of warm emotion when heattended the conference:
It is impossible to exaggerate the feelings which are born out of an occasion like this.
For years in Burma I dreamt my Asiatic dreams. My Asiatic blood has always called toother Asiatics: In my dream, both sleeping and waking, I have always heard the voice ofAsia calling to her children. Today, for the first time, I hear Asia’s voice calling again,
but this time not in a dream.
Before the war, it seemed that such a meeting as this would be inconceivable. It would
have been impossible then for Asiatics to gather together like this. Yet now we are here.
I see with my mind’s eye a new world being exacted.
When we were only sixteen million Burmese, although we struggled for our birthright, it
was in vain. For generations our patriots rose, led the people against the British enemy.
Every revolt of ours against the enemy was mercilessly crushed. Thus, some twenty
years ago in a national revolt Burmese villages went up in flames, Burmese women weremassacred, Burmese patriots were imprisoned, hanged, exiled. But, although the revolt
ended in defeat, the flame, the Asiatic flame, kept burning in every Burmese heart.
India's gratitude to Japan
Subhas Chandra Bose is an Indian national hero.

34

In India he is known as "Netaji", which means "great leader". He is revered along withGandhi and Nehru as one of the three key leaders of the Indian independence movement.
In his speech, Bose listed the major international conferences which had taken place overthe span of more than a hundred years, including the Congress of Vienna following thedownfall of Napoleon, the Congress of Paris after the Crimean War, the Congress of Berlinin the aftermath of the Russo-Turkish War, the Versailles Peace Conference after WorldWar I, the Washington Naval Conference of 1921 to secure Anglo-American supremacy in
the Pacific Ocean, and the Locarno Conference of 1925:
And as I sat listening to the proceedings of this historic Assembly, I began to wonder
what the difference was between this Assembly and similar assemblies that the world’s
history has witnessed in bygone days.
Your Excellency, this is not a conference for dividing the spoils among theconquerors. This is not a conference for hatching a conspiracy to victimize a weakpower, nor is it a conference for trying to defraud a weak neighbour. This is an
Assembly of liberated nations, an Assembly that is out to create a new order in this partof the world, on the basis of the sacred principles of justice, national sovereignty,
reciprocity in international relations and mutual aid and assistance.
Bose closed his speech with, "I pray to God that this Joint Declaration which this historic
Assembly has unanimously adopted this afternoon may prove to be a charter for the nationsof East Asia and, what is more, a charter for the suppressed nations of the whole world.”
Whereas Gandhi and Nehru advocated non-violent resistance, Bose parted company withthem by insisting on the path of armed revolution.
Following the outbreak of World War II in Europe, Bose evaded the tight surveillance of
the British authorities and escaped India by way of Afghanistan. He then made his way toGermany where he asked for support.
In February 1943, Bose boarded a U-boat at the German port of Kiel and, after rounding theCape of Good Hope in South Africa, he transferred to a Japanese submarine off the coast ofMadagascar. In May, he arrived at Sumatra and then flew to Tokyo.
After reaching Tokyo, Bose delivered an eloquent speech at Hibiya Public Hall:
About forty years ago, when I started attending elementary school, an Asian nation went
to war with the world's largest imperial power, Russia. That Asian nation defeated
Russia. That nation was Japan. When the news reached us, a wave of excitement spread
across all India. Everywhere in India, heroic tales of the Siege of Port Arthur, the Battleof Mukden, and the Naval Battle of Tsushima caused a sensation. The children of India
sincerely admired General Nogi and Marshal-Admiral Togo. My parents competed to
get their hands on photos of the General and Marshal-Admiral, but were unable to.

35

Instead, they bought Japanese trinkets at the marketplace and decorated our home withthem. This time, Japan has declared war on India's sworn enemy, Great Britain. Japan
has given the Indian people a once in a lifetime opportunity for independence, and weare truly grateful for it. Japan is Asia's beacon of hope. If we pass up this opportunity,
another one like it may not appear again for the next one hundred years. I am certain that
victory will be ours and that India will achieve its dream of independence.
The Greater Asia Declaration was unanimously adopted. At the conference, each Asian
nation agreed to honor their traditions, promote creativity, awaken cultural activity, anddevelop their economies under the principles of cooperation and reciprocity, as well as to"construct a morality-based order of co-existence and co-prosperity." The declaration ended
with a commitment to "strengthen our friendship with all the nations of the world, abolishracial discrimination, promote worldwide cultural exchange, actively open up resources,
and contribute to global progress."
The Greater East Asia Conference as a turning point in world history
By gathering together the leaders of the Asian people under the banner of global racialequality, the Greater East Asia Conference was a major turning point marking the end of along period in human history.
In August 1941, President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill met aboard a ship in the
Atlantic Ocean and unveiled the “Atlantic Charter”. Although the Atlantic Charter airily
promised to "respect the rights of all peoples to choose the form of government underwhich they will live," that pledge was only aimed at European peoples.
During the war, what Roosevelt and Churchill feared the most was that Chiang's
government in China might make peace with Japan.
If Chiang's government dropped out of the war and joined Japan, then Roosevelt andChurchill's war would turn into a "race war," pitting the white race against the nonwhiteraces.
Consequently, the United States had no choice but to continue to pour generous amounts offinancial aid and massive quantities of military supplies into China, while fully knowingthat Chiang's government was entirely corrupt.
While the Japanese Army advanced south down the Malay Peninsula toward Singapore, theFujiwara Agency, a military intelligence unit known as the "F Agency", called on Indiansoldiers serving in the British Army to defect. Indian soldiers surrendered one after anotherand eagerly offered their services to the Japanese Army. Their numbers swelled to over
45,000 men.
After the fall of Singapore, these Indian soldiers aspired to liberate their country andformed the Indian National Army (INA).

36

In March 1944, the Japanese Army marched from Burma into India with the support of the
INA, making their target the northeastern Indian city of Imphal.
The Japanese Army also occupied the Andaman Islands, which stretch down into the Indian
Ocean. Here, Bose set up the seat of his Provisional Government of Free India with himself
as prime minister.
Bose traveled from Tokyo to Singapore, where he took up command of the Indian National
Army.
Bose announced the INA's campaign using the slogan Chalo Delhi (To Delhi!), and his
troops marched while singing the stirring marching song, Chalo, Chalo Delhi. For them,this was a historic advance into Mother India.
The officers and men of the INA crossed the India-Burma border along with the JapaneseArmy and marched on Imphal while shouting the war cry, Chalo Delhi. Bose encouraged
his men by telling them to "Raise our country's flag over the Red Fort!"
The Red Fort is an imposing castle dating from the time of the Mughal Empire (1526-1858)
which is located in the old district of New Delhi. It received its name because it wasconstructed of red stone.
On October 28, 1956, The Observer, a British newspaper of record, printed an article by theworld famous historian Arnold Toynbee which included the following:"The Japanese in the Second World War made history, not for themselves, but for
unintended beneficiaries and in all the countries temporarily included in the short-lived
Japanese 'Co-Prosperity Sphere'... The Japanese made history by demonstrating to the restof the human race that the Western rulers of Asian and African were not the invincible
demigods that they had been deemed to be for the last two centuries."
Local residents' cooperation with the Japanese Army
Since 1945, journalist Henry S. Stokes worked, in succession, as Tokyo bureau chief for
The New York Times, the Financial Times, and the London Times.
Stokes has written the following in praise of Japan's liberation of Asia and the crucial role
played by the Greater East Asia Conference in the development of world history:"During World War II, Japan worked to create a 'fifth column' in the Southeast Asiancolonial possessions of the United States, Great Britain, and the Netherlands. This strategy
succeeded because the Japanese Army was liberating the peoples of Asia from Westernimperialism and guiding them toward independence. The Japanese Army was not invading
Asia in order to dominate it. Japan provided the colonized peoples of Asia with education

37

and military training in order to help them achieve independence. Subhas Chandra Bose,the commander of the Indian National Army who was supported by the Japanese Army,declared that 'Japan is Asia's beacon of hope' and expressed wholehearted gratitude to theJapanese. The situation was the same in Malaysia and Singapore. The reason why Japanese
intelligence operations succeeded and why the British were forced to surrender is precisely
because the Japanese were fighting for the just cause of liberating Asia from white rule.
Today, many Japanese scholars continue to claim that the Greater East Asia Conference
was a gathering of 'puppet leaders of Japanese occupied states' which was convened solely
for the purposes of domestic propaganda. However, it is those Japanese who are the real
puppets. They are the puppets of the victor powers who are still trying to control Japan."A "fifth column" refers to "forces within a country who are secretly assisting the enemy".
As the Japanese Army advanced, local residents eagerly aided the Japanese soldiers.
Japan's "intelligence operations" involved covert espionage work.
Despite overwhelming support from native peoples, as documented in contemporary
accounts written by non-Japanese people, Japan's school textbooks and dictionaries stilldefine the Greater East Asia Conference as a "conference convened to bring together the'puppet leaders of Japanese occupied states' for the purposes of propaganda".
In the authoritative Japanese dictionary Kojien, the entry on Ba Maw describes him as,"Politician and nationalist leader of Burma (now Myanmar)... When the Japanese Army
invaded Burma during World War II he collaborated with the Japanese and launched acampaign against Great Britain. In August of 1943 he declared Burma's 'independence' andwas installed as its national leader, but this was actually a Japanese puppet government."
The massive Heibonsha World Encyclopedia does not include an entry on the Greater East
Asia Conference, nor does the term even appear elsewhere. There is a short entry for "Great
East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere", but it starts with "a slogan used to justify Japan's policyof aggression towards China and Southeast Asia during World War II".
Why are Japanese dictionaries and encyclopedias propagating the victors’ historical view?

38Chapter 4 - The Noble Spirit Which Inspired the People of Asia
The Battle of Imphal's critical role in Indian independence
After Japan lost the war, Great Britain branded the forces of the Indian National Army, whofought at the Battle of Imphal, as a rebel army. Three former officers of the army, one
Hindu, one Sikh, and one Muslim, were put on trial at the Red Fort for high treason against
the British crown.
Hinduism, Sikhism, and Islam are the three major religions of India, and these three
officers had been selected as symbols of India.
However, when the trial began, widespread anger erupted across India. The people of India
stood up as one to say, "The men of the INA were patriots, not traitors!"
Millions of Indians flooded into the streets. The British attempted to suppress these massdemonstrations, even buzzing them with Spitfire aircraft and strafing them with machine
gun fire from the air, but this only increased the chaos.
Eventually, even Indian soldiers and their units joined in on the protests, leaving GreatBritain with no choice but to grant India its independence.
Eric Hobsbawm was a prominent British historian who had worked as a professor at the
University of London. In his magnum opus, a reflection on the twentieth century entitled"The Age of Extremes", Hobsbawm argued that the independence of India was not thework of independence activists like Gandhi and Nehru, but rather was sparked by the attack
on India by the Indian National Army and the Japanese during the Battle of Imphal.
The Battle of Imphal ended in a terrible military defeat, but it did succeed in its objective to
put India back in the hands of the Indian people.
Since the 1980s, I have been to India many times.
In August, 1997, I attended the ceremonies commemorating the fiftieth anniversary ofIndian independence, which were held in New Delhi. There were a great many special
events.
In his address, the leading Indian politician and former Speaker of the Lower House Rabi
Ray said, "As we celebrate this great day, we cannot allow ourselves to forget the year
1905. The people of India were emboldened by Japan's victory in the Russo-Japanese War
and rose up to join the independence movement." Rabi Ray was a longtime socialist andhad been considered for the presidency several times by then.

39Dr. Pran Nath Lekhi, an Indian independence fighter and influential lawyer, said of theBattle of Imphal, "As long as the light of the sun illuminates the sky, the light of the moonsoaks the earth, and the light of the stars shine in the night, the people of India will notforget their debt of gratitude to the people of Japan."
The next year, when I returned to New Delhi, three senior members of the All India INA
Committee, a veterans' association for former Indian National Army members, paid me avisit at the hotel where I was staying. They handed me a letter of thanks written in English
and told me, "We veterans all feel gratitude to Japan. Please take this letter of thanks to
Yasukuni Shrine as an offering."
I translated the letter into Japanese and delivered it to Yasukuni Shrine.
The letter read, "India's debt to Japan is too great to be adequately expressed through words.
Your great country offered us all the military assistance it could at the time of the liberationof India. A hundred thousand or more Japanese soldiers fought with us as comrades in arms
and shed their blood, sweat, and tears alongside us. The Indian National Army will neverforget all those noble men of the Japanese Imperial Army who perished for the cause ofIndia. The Imperial Japanese Army made India an independent country, and we pray thatthe bond between India and Japan will henceforth become even stronger. -SS Yadav,
Captain in the Indian National Army and General Secretary of the All India INA
Committee"
Yasukuni Shrine duly put the letter and its Japanese translation up for display in its war
museum, Yushukan.
Over 20,000 Japanese soldiers died of disease during the Battle of Imphal. The whole
campaign was regarded as being highly reckless, and during the Japanese retreat, huge
numbers of soldiers died of disease, injuries, and starvation. So many corpses were piled up
along the Japanese lines of retreat that they were called "bone roads".
A letter from a war widow
After returning from India, I got a spot on a television program in which I mentioned
Hobsbawm's views on the Battle of Imphal and the letter of thanks from the All India INA
Committee I had been asked to deliver to Yasukuni Shrine.
After this, a letter was sent to the television station addressed to me from a widow who said
that her husband had died during the Battle of Imphal.
She wrote in her letter, "All this time, I believed that my husband had died in vain. When I
saw that television program and learned that the Battle of Imphal had led to the
independence of India, I couldn't help but shed tears of joy... I'm sorry to bother a busy man
such as yourself, but if you would kindly send me a video of that program, I would be40

deeply grateful. I want to place it on the altar dedicated to my late husband." Folded up andenclosed in the letter were five thousand yen in new banknotes.
I asked the television station for a video, which I then mailed to the widow.
Following Japan's defeat in the war, Bose decided to escape to the Soviet Union and carryon the struggle for independence from there. On August 18, he landed at Taipei Airport
aboard a Japanese Army transport plane, but immediately after it took off again bound for
Dalian, it crashed and burst into flames, killing Bose.
Today, bronze statues of Bose stand on the premises of India's Parliament House and in thegarden of the Red Fort. Bose's portrait in Parliament House was hung beside those of Nehru
and Gandhi.
Until recently, the Indian ambassador in Tokyo had invited veterans of F Agency or theirsurviving family members to the embassy for an annual appreciation banquet every October
21. On October 21, Bose had established the Provisional Government of Free India withJapanese support, a date which is commemorated in India as Azad Hind Day, the Day ofFree India.
The independence monument engraved with Japan's imperial year
Indonesia declared its independence two days after Japan surrendered.
Japan had promised the month before to grant Indonesia independence in September, butultimately Japan surrendered to the Allies one month before.
The Indonesian independence leaders Sukarno and Hatta strongly desired to declare
independence before the Allied forces arrived, but Japanese Army headquarters in Jakarta
firmly rejected their request. The Japanese Army was worried about what sort of revenge
the Allies might exact upon Japan if it granted Indonesia independence after the surrender.
In spite of the Japanese Army's strong rejection, Hatta and Sukarno went through with theirdeclaration of independence on August 17. Out of gratitude to Japan, the date printed on the
declaration of independence is "17 8 05", meaning August 17 of the 2,605th year since thefounding of Japan's ruling imperial dynasty in 660 BC. This "imperial year" system was incommon use in Japan before World War II.
Japan did not compel Indonesia to use the imperial year. Indonesia is a Muslim country, soeven though the Indonesians could not have used the year 1945 from the Christian calendar,
they could have used the relevant date from the Muslim calendar. Even now, Japan's
imperial year remains engraved on Indonesia's independence monument in Jakarta.

41

My first visit to Indonesia was in the year 1970 when I was invited to a development
economics conference in Jakarta called, "Indonesia in the Year 2000", presided over by
President Suharto.
During World War II, Japan recruited young Indonesians to serve in the volunteer army
Defenders of the Homeland, known by its Indonesian acronym PETA. Even today, atIndonesia's Independence Day ceremonies held in Jakarta every August 17, former officersof PETA attend the ceremonies with the Indonesian flag in hand and a Japanese sword
hung from the belt of their green uniforms.
Then a female chorus sings the PETA March in Indonesian, which goes "Old Asia suffersin misery, we have endured harsh repression for centuries, Greater Japan stands up
valiantly, to protect us and save Asia, Onward! Onward! PETA!" After this, they usually
sing patriotic Japanese songs in the Japanese language such as "Flower of Patriotism" and"The Patriotic March". I own a video recording of the entire ceremony.
Due to the work of the officers and men of the Japanese Army, PETA members constituted
Indonesia's national army at the time of independence and trained over 40,000 young men.
After the war had ended, British and Dutch soldiers landed in Indonesia in a bid to bringIndonesia back under Dutch colonial rule.
They were fired upon by Indonesian soldiers bearing Indonesia's red and white flag, thus
starting a brutal war for independence which lasted four years. Former members of PETA
formed the core of the military forces fighting for independence.
PETA was the incubator of many of Indonesia's most talented postwar political leaders.
Among PETA leaders were future President Suharto, future Vice-President Umar
Wirahadikusumah, and Sudirman, the first commander-in-chief of the Indonesian Army,
who was a major unit leader in PETA.
Former PETA members say uniformly that the education they received from the JapaneseArmy provided Indonesian youth with not only military training, but also the physical andmental training necessary to fight for independence.
After the end of the war, Indonesians continued to pay deep respect to the Japanese officers
who contributed to Indonesia's independence and the Japanese soldiers who served as
instructors in PETA.
When I travelled to Jakarta, former PETA members often paid me visits at my hotel alongwith their wives.

42

They gathered in the hotel lobby and, with lyric sheets in hand, they each sang for me aseries of Japanese patriotic and military songs including "Flower of Patriotism", "Heaven's
Paratroopers", and "A Soldier's Specialty".
In 1977, when the South Korean representative at an international conference in Manila
strongly criticized Japan, Brigadier General Ali Murtopo, special advisor to the president ofIndonesia and Deputy Minister of Information, requested a chance to speak, and hereprimanded the South Korean representative as follows.
"Japan is Asia's shining light. Japan fought World War II to make Asia independent.
Although this was a battle the people of Asia should have fought, it was the people of Japan
who stood up and sacrificed themselves for the cause."
According to Ali Murtopo, the other representatives from Southeast Asia applauded all at
once, and the South Korean representative hung his head downward in dismay.
In the year 2011, the Indonesian government donated to Japan a bronze statue of General
Sudirman, the supreme commander of Indonesian forces during the war for independence.
Today, this statue is located on the grounds of the Japanese Defense Ministry in
Ichigayadai, Tokyo.
Ichigayadai is also where the Tokyo War Crimes Trial was held so that the United States
could try Japan's leaders for the crime of acts of aggression against Asia.
During the Indonesian war for independence, General Sudirman was known as Pa Dirman,
meaning Father Dirman. He was beloved by all his countrymen.
In Jakarta, there is a Sudirman Street where, at its center, an identical bronze statue ofGeneral Sudirman also stands.
Japan's statue of Sudirman was set up in the country's most fitting spot for it. The fact thatIndonesia gave Japan a statue of the supreme commander of its independence army and put
it in Ichigayadai is a refutation of the legality and the verdict of the Tokyo War Crimes
Trial.
Anyone who makes a request at the Ministry of Defense is permitted to view its statue ofGeneral Sudirman. Why not go pay your respects there on Indonesia's Independence Day
next August 17?
The movie "Pride: The Fateful Moment" moved Japan’s youth
The Tokyo War Crimes Trial aimed to try Japan's leaders for "crimes against peace" before
a tribunal that the Allies had established in Ichigayadai. However, the Allies had decided in43

advance that Japan was the "aggressor nation". The Tokyo War Crimes Trial was in fact an
act of murder that certainly did not deserve to be called a "trial".
When I was still in university, I signed on with the script department at Toho Studios andwas involved in film production. However, my true dream since then was to create a drama
film, perhaps my magnum opus, proving that the Tokyo War Crimes Trial was nothing
more than an unjust lynching carried out by the victor powers of World War II.
In 1998, the movie "Pride: The Fateful Moment", featuring Prime Minister Tojo Hideki andIndian justice Radhabinod Pal as its protagonists, was produced and then distributed byToei Studios. I was the author of the film's draft screenplay.
The word "Pride" which I used in the title was meant to express the pride of Japan and of
Tojo Hideki while he was on trial as a defendant.
During our first preliminary discussions with Toei Studios, the studio executives actually
told us that, "We suspect that a movie on that sort of topic will only appeal to seniorcitizens at least in their 60s or 70s."
And yet, when the film premiered, more than half of its audience was in their forties or
younger. I peered in on several screenings of the film, and always saw plenty of people intheir 20s or 30s. Not a few among them were moved to tears by the film.
Even prior to the premiere of "Pride: The Fateful Moment", when I was serving on the
production committee, the film was garnering a tremendous response and many excellent
reviews nationwide. It became the most viewed Japanese movie in the first half of the year
1998. Across the whole year, it was the second highest grossing film at the box office, after
Toho's movie "Bayside Shakedown".
It attracted this much attention even before its premiere thanks to the considerable coverage
the movie received in newspapers and on television.
Before the preview screening, I happened by chance to turn on NHK TV and saw a 7:00
AM news broadcast which started with former Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi's visit
to China. There was a video of his meeting with Chinese President Jiang Zemin, during
which Jiang denounced our movie and Murayama apologized in response.
There was a close-up of Murayama hanging his head and saying "I deeply apologize."
However, if I had been in Mr. Murayama's position I would have responded to Jiang's
criticism by saying, "I too found the movie to be deplorable, but unlike your country Japanis a democracy. Even if Japanese citizens create a scandalous movie, the government may
not intervene."44That morning, all of Japan's morning newspapers, from the Yomiuri Shimbun to theMainichi Shimbun, were covering this story at the top of their front pages. Under normal
circumstances, it would have been unheard-of for newspapers to discuss an entertainment
film on their front page. My colleagues and I were all thrilled by the publicity.
China was familiar with the film even before the preview screening. Clearly, either a personfrom Toei's labor union or someone else with inside connections had tipped off the Chinese
embassy in advance.
Bringing back the spirit of "self-preservation and self-defense"
I served on the production committee of the 2001 film, "Merdeka 17805", about theJapanese liberation of Indonesia. It was released nationwide by Toei Studios.
This was Japan's first nationwide screening of a factually-based drama film concerning
Japan's liberation of Asian peoples during World War II.
At the start of the film the subtitles say in large lettering, "Japan went to war for its own
self-preservation and self-defense." It was also the first postwar Japanese film to include
this message.
The phrase "self-preservation and self-defense" appears in Japan's Imperial Declaration of
War of 1941 against the United States and Great Britain.
I viewed the movie many times from the pre-editing rush stage and onwards, but I wastouched each time I saw this.
There were large audiences at preview screenings of the film, and many among them weremoved to tears. One university professor told me, "Our heartfelt tears have washed away
the fifty-five years of humiliation which have elapsed since the end of the war." A memberof the Japan Self-Defense Forces remarked that, "I will tell my colleagues to bring a towel
to dry away their tears."
After freeing Indonesia, then known as the Dutch East Indies, from three hundred and fifty
years of Dutch colonial rule in March of 1942, the Japanese Army set up a militaryadministration with the goal of preparing the country for independence. The Japaneseestablished Indonesian as the standard national language, improved school education, andfounded organizations like women's groups, civil defense units, public service groups, andneighborhood associations which operated on all the islands of Indonesia.
The movie is based on the true story of how the Japanese Army founded and trained PETA,
the forerunner to the post-independence Indonesian Armed Forces.
Before the release of the movie, my novelization, also entitled "Merdeka 17805", waspublished.

45

It is a work that harkens back to a time and a spirit that have been forgotten.
The protagonist is based on the real-life Yanagawa Munenari, a hot-blooded First
Lieutenant (promoted to Captain after the war) in the Japanese Army. After graduatingfrom Takushoku University, Yanagawa studied at the Nakano School for army intelligence
officers. In 1942, he participated in a landing operation under enemy fire on the island of
Java. The scene in the movie where he single-handedly charges into the Dutch Army
headquarters with his sword drawn and demands the surrender of the commander was also
an actual event.
Yanagawa opened the Youth Dojo to train the future leaders of the Indonesian National
Armed Forces. He played a key role in the founding of PETA.
Following Japan's defeat, the Dutch Army returned to Indonesia with the support of the
British Army in order to restore the colonial regime. They were resisted bypro-independence Indonesian forces carrying Indonesia's red and white national flag, theMerah-Putih. Former members of PETA, who numbered 38,000 men, formed their core.
If PETA had never existed, Indonesia could not possibly have won the war for
independence.
Two thousand Japanese soldiers declined to return to Japan after the end of World War II
and, in order to continue their fight to liberate Asia, they instead remained in Indonesia
where they participated in the war for independence alongside the Indonesian people.
Yanagawa returned home after the end of World War II, so the rest of the protagonist's
story is fictional.
Half of the over two thousand Japanese soldiers who fought in Indonesia's war for
independence died in combat. The remains of the Japanese soldiers who gave their lives forIndonesia's independence today lie in Indonesia's Heroes' Cemetery.
I named the protagonist Shimazaki Takeo. Right after the Indonesians have achieved
victory in the intense final battle for Yogyakarta, Java, Shimazaki is rejoicing with his
Indonesian girlfriend when he is shot and killed by a Dutch sniper.
I wrote this scene as follows.
"The bright moon had illuminated the contours of the far-away mountains.
Aryati's forehead reflected the stars and the moonlight cast beautiful shadows over her face.
At that moment, Shimazaki suddenly lurched backwards and fell to the ground. A second
later, the sound of a gunshot rang out from far in the distance.

46

'Takeo!', Aryati screamed. She picked up Shimazaki and cradled him on her lap. The bullet
had hit him directly through his chest.
He had been shot by a sniper. The Indonesian side immediately returned fire. Over ten
members of his unit dashed into the forest all at once in pursuit of the Dutch soldiers.
Nurhadi ran up to Shimazaki, but there was nothing he could do for him.
Shimazaki could only mumble, "Ryati", in a feeble voice.
'Takeo! Takeo! Don't leave me! Takeo!'
Tears poured down Aryati's nose and face.
Shimazaki gathered all his remaining strength and smiled faintly.
'Takeo! Hang in there. Your dream is a reality! Japan was defeated, but you have won!'Aryati pressed her cheek against Shimazaki's again and again as Shimazaki faded away."
I meant Aryati's line to signify that Japan had lost the war as a country, but won the war asa people.
Ryati was Shimazaki's term of endearment for Aryati, and Nurhadi was a PETA member
who had served alongside Shimazaki.
I went to Indonesia as the film "Merdeka 17805" was being shot on location. Vice
Commander of the Indonesian Armed Forces Bambang Yudhoyono graciously allowed us
to borrow two hundred soldiers for shooting scenes over a period of two months. Military
museums also provided us with free use of contemporary weaponry like machine guns andrifles.
The film contains many battle scenes, but the untrained extras we had hired could not evenmarch in file correctly, and we would never have been able to complete the film without thecooperation we had received from the Indonesian Armed Forces.
In front of the military museum in Jakarta, there is a Japanese, World War II-era Tachikawa
Ki-9 Training Aircraft on display. The Tachikawa Ki-9 was a biplane that wasaffectionately known to the Japanese people as the "Red Dragonfly". Over the course ofWorld War II, it was difficult to transport petroleum from Indonesia to the Japanese
mainland, and so the training of pilots was undertaken in Indonesia.

47

The Japanese Army recruited young Indonesian volunteers, who were called "heiho", andtaught them how to operate and maintain aircraft. After the end of World War II,
Indonesia's pro-independence forces flew their Tachikawa Ki-9 aircraft above Dutch
positions and dropped bombs on them by hand.
The bottom half of the Japanese sun flag on the fuselage of the Tachikawa Ki-9 at the
military museum in Jakarta was repainted white in order to change it into an Indonesian
flag.
Vice Commander of the Indonesian Armed Forces Bambang Yudhoyono was elected
President of Indonesia in 2004.
Yanagawa Munenari's Youth Dojo was located in the city of Bogor on Java. The Youth
Dojo expanded into a training facility for PETA officers.
Today there is a PETA Museum in Bogor in front of which stands, just like on Sudirman
Street, a statue of General Sudirman.
The museum contains exhibits featuring weapons used by PETA as well as many
documents, photographs, and artwork. Among them is a relief depicting Indonesian youth
wrestling on sandbags under the guidance of a Japanese Army instructor.
In the film "Merdeka 17805", there is one scene in which even the Japanese Armynoncommissioned officers, who are training Indonesian men on the grounds of the YouthDojo, have stripped naked and are shouting "Fight until death!" with them in Indonesian.
King Sihanouk in the role of a Japanese soldier
I have a close relationship with His Majesty King Sihanouk of Cambodia, and I know that
he is not sparing in his praise for the conduct of the Japanese Army during World War II.
The King has made a hobby of directing and starring in his own movies.
In the year 1979, while he was in exile in North Korea, King Sihanouk produced andstarred in the drama film "Rose of Bokor", made in a film studio in Pyongyang.
After the Vietnamese Army invaded Cambodia, the King fled abroad and divided his time
between staying in Beijing and Pyongyang. When he travelled to Tokyo as a guest of theJapanese government, he always lodged at the Imperial Hotel.
One day I was invited to the hotel and, while being treated to wine, I listened to what theKing had to say. It was at this time that I received a video of the film.

48

King Sihanouk told me that at the preview screening, President Kim Il-sung, who wasattending with his eldest son Secretary of the Central Committee Kim Jong-il, praised it as"a magnificent film".
The film starts with a portrait of President Kim Il-sung alongside subtitles praising his
leadership. The story begins with the stationing of Japanese soldiers in Bokor, Cambodia.
The King plays as Colonel Hasegawa Ichiro, a unit leader in the Japanese Army, and theKing's actual wife Queen Monique appears as Hasegawa's lover, the beautiful daughter of apowerful local man. The video's dialogue was dubbed into Korean, but there were also
English subtitles for the benefit of foreign audiences.
The movie portrayed the Japanese Army as a highly disciplined force. The many Japanesesoldiers appearing in the film were members of the North Korean Army mobilized as extras.
When the Japanese Army came to Bokor, cheering crowds greeted them as "liberators".
The Japanese soldiers occupied the former headquarters of the French Army, took down the
French Tricolor from its roof, and raised the flag of Japan in its place.
The extras of the North Korean Army strained to smile as they lined up and presented arms
towards the Japanese flag. Then Colonel Hasegawa delivered a speech declaring that
"Japan is fighting to liberate Asia." Hasegawa was presented throughout the film as being agallant Japanese soldier with a military saber hanging on his belt.
There is a scene in which the Japanese Army fights with the French Army. The Frenchcommander was killed in combat and a funeral was held at a church on a small hill.
Hasegawa also attended the funeral, and as the coffin was being lowered into the earth,
Hasegawa stood in salute. As a soldier, he behaved courteously even towards his enemies.
Hasegawa had decorated the top of his office desk with a portrait of the Emperor in uniform
riding on a white stallion. In the final days of the war, his aide-de-camp brought him areport informing him that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima. Once his
aide-de-camp left the room, Hasegawa burst into tears and lamentation.
After receiving a communiqué about Japan's unconditional surrender to the Allies,
Hasegawa went to the home of his lover, the daughter of a local magnate played by Queen
Monique, and played a piece on the piano.
The piece was the Japanese folk song, "Cherry Blossoms, Cherry Blossoms". As
Hasegawa's piano music plays, images appear one after another showing the cherry
blossoms of springtime Japan in full bloom, the mountains and rivers of the Japanese
autumn full of colored foliage, and the white snow of the Japanese winter.

49

The film conveys the message that, even though Japan was defeated in war, the noble spiritof the Japanese people remained unaltered. I was profoundly moved both by King
Sihanouk's affection for Japan, and the spirit of our forbearers who built the Japan which isstill admired by people across Asia.
Every time my workplace is visited by Korean journalists, I show this film to them. It
doesn't fail to leave them speechless.
Japan had completely changed the face of Asia.
Pro-Japanese collaborators as "race heroes"
The presumption in today's Japan, that Japan is hated because of its conquest of Asia during
World War II, is quite contrary to the facts.
It is true that, after the end of the war, thousands of Chinese people who collaborated withJapan, including the leaders of the Wang Jingwei government, were put on trial andexecuted as "hanjian", which means "race traitors".
On the other hand, in no country between Southeast Asia and India were any pro-Japanesecollaborators ever put on trial. Going so far as to execute them would have beenunthinkable.
And yet, that ought to have happened if Japan had been hated and deemed an aggressor. In
fact, pro-Japanese collaborators in Indonesia, India, and Myanmar were regarded as "raceheroes" after the end of the war.
In the Philippines, the eldest son of President Jose Laurel studied at the Imperial JapaneseArmy Academy during the war and later became the Filipino ambassador to Japan. The
family of President Aquino also cooperated with Japan, and indeed, one could cite
innumerable similar examples from any country.

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Chapter 5 - Freedom From Racial Discrimination
Emperor Hirohito's thoughts on racial discrimination
In the United States, Japanese people were the object of contempt and subjected to
atrocious discrimination.
In 1924, the United States Congress passed the Asian Exclusion Act. Japanese immigrants
were not permitted to own either land or a house. The children of Japanese immigrants
were barred from public schools.
Although an exclusion movement against Japanese immigration had already been active in
California for some time, the people of Japan viewed the Asian Exclusion Act as an
unbearable humiliation and were outraged by it.
Nitobe Inazo, the famous author of "Bushido: The Soul of Japan," had taken classes at
Sapporo Agricultural College taught by American agricultural scientist William Clark, andlater, as a young man, studied in the United States. From 1920, he worked as
Undersecretary-General for the League of Nations. However, he was so devastated by themounting American anti-Japanese movement, that he declared, "I shall never again set footin the United States."
In 1946, Emperor Hirohito spoke candidly to his close aides about what had provoked thewar between Japan and the United States:"If you ask me what caused the war, I would say it all goes back to the contents of thepeace treaty signed after the end of World War I [in 1919 at the Versailles Peace
Conference in Paris]. The Racial Equality Proposal upon which Japan had insisted was
rejected by the great powers. After this, the feeling persisted that people of yellow skinwere being discriminated against by people of white skin. Such things like California's
refusal to accept Japanese immigrants were enough to provoke deep resentment in theJapanese mind. Once the militarists had risen up amidst this climate of national anger, it
was no easy task to restrain them."
In the year 2000, Takushoku University celebrated its one hundredth anniversary.
Takushoku University had been founded in 1900 as the Taiwan Association School in order
to train talented students to do development work abroad.
Emperor Akihito attended the commemorative ceremony, and in his address he remarked,"The song of this university extols the ambitions of young people to go adventuring abroad,and at the same time cautions them to 'Never discriminate, on the basis of color or land,against anyone who stands before you.' It seems to me that many students from that timeleft university for an unknown world holding that vision in their hearts."51

In his address, Akihito was undoubtedly channeling the thoughts of his father Hirohito.
"Self-preservation and self-defense" and the liberation of Asia
Japan was involved in World War II because the United States provoked the Japanese,drove them into a corner, and finally forced them to fight purely for their own
self-preservation and self-defense.
Japan did not, however, go to war in order to liberate Asia from Western colonial rule. It
was only after the start of the war that Japan decided to make Asian liberation one of its
war aims.
The Imperial Declaration of War against the United States and Great Britain stated that
"Given the situation, the Empire must now stand up resolutely and destroy all obstacles forthe sake of our own self-preservation and self-defense." In the declaration, the Emperor
lamented that going to war was "not at all what I desired". The Japanese could simply notbear the unjust pressure America was applying to them, and so, for their own
self-preservation and self-defense, finally rose up to resist.
Although Japan was fighting in self-defense, the Imperial Declaration of War also stated inits conclusion that Japan "hopes to establish a lasting peace in East Asia which will
maintain the glory of the Empire."Thus, Japan aspired to establish a lasting peace in Asia by liberating it from the Western
powers.
Many Japanese youths died on the battlefield with conviction for the cause of Asianliberation. Thanks to Japan's sacrifices, not only Asians but Africans were eventuallyliberated.
Following the end of the war, the ripples of Asian liberation carried over to the continent ofAfrica, where African nations, one after the other, would gain independence.
Bert V.A. Roling on the illegality of the Tokyo War Crimes Trial
At the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, which was held under the American occupation,
Radhabinod Pal of India was not the only justice among the eleven to submit verdicts
which dissented from the majority view. The two others were Bert V.A. Roling of theNetherlands and Henri Bernard of France.
Their dissenting verdicts were restricted from the Japanese public during the American
occupation.
Roling, who came to be renowned as a world authority on international law, published amemoir later in his life entitled "The Tokyo Trial and Beyond".

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In this book, Roling concludes that the Tokyo War Crimes Trial was illegal:
Racial discrimination may have been one of the roots of the Pacific War... [TheAmericans] were more or less indoctrinated to look on the Japanese as a sub-human race.
The bombing of the Japanese cities, followed by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima andNagasaki, was made possible by precisely that feeling that it was not human beings they
were cremating by the hundreds of thousands... In Japan, we were all aware of thebombings and the burnings of Tokyo and Yokohama and other big cities. It was horriblethat we went there for the purpose of vindicating the laws of war, and yet saw every day
how the Allies had violated them dreadfully. But to claim that there should be a trial inwhich vanquished and victors should both be held in judgement, that's impossible. Tojo
was right that in this respect Tokyo was victors' justice only.
Roling also described in detail the circumstances leading up to the war, explaining thatJapan's war aim was to create an "Asia for the Asians". He also noted that, "there was nointention to expel the powers from Asia by military force. Japan's military might was toserve a deterrent function only."
The birth of 164 independent nations
As I watched the television broadcast of the Imperial Funeral of the recently deceased
Emperor Hirohito, I could not hold back my tears. It was not because I felt sorrow at thedeath of the Emperor, who had lived a long life.
I had heard from the TV commentary that the representatives and heads of state of 164
countries had come from all over the world to express their condolences, and at thatmoment I was gripped with admiration for how glorious Emperor Hirohito's reign had been
for Japan.
The fact that the world then contained 164 independent nations was made possible only
through the sacrifices made by all of Japan during World War II. The peoples of Asia andAfrica had been liberated and all become independent.
It reminded me of the old Japanese legend in which one of the gods immolates herself inthe process of giving birth to Japan and then travels to the underworld. I imagined in mymind the thought of everyone attending the funeral in the presence of the spirits of themillions of Japanese people who perished in the war.
If Japan had lost the Russo-Japanese War and had not been willing to suffer such terrible
losses during World War II, then the people of Asia and Africa would still today be living
under oppressive Western colonial rule.
Less than twenty countries sent delegates to attend the funeral of Emperor Meiji in 1912.
By the time of the Taisho period (1912-1926) Japan was already a major power, ranking

53equally with Western nations, but even Emperor Taisho's funeral was attended by delegatesfrom less than forty countries.
With most of Africa and Asia dominated under white colonialism, the world contained few
independent nations.
In an entry dated December 9, 1941, the day after the outbreak of the war, "The Official
Record of the Life of Emperor Hirohito" states that, "A ceremony was undertaken on theoccasion of the declaration of war. At 9:45 AM the Emperor left through the gate of theinner courtyard to worship at the imperial shrines Kashikodokoro, Koreiden, and Shinden,
and will make the following proclamation to the gods."
In the proclamation, the Emperor states that, "In accordance with the teachings ofsuccessive emperors, I have wished for universal brotherhood and strived to seek friendshipand harmony with other nations. In spite of this, we have come to a point where the very
existence of our country is in jeopardy. As terribly regrettable as it is, we have gone to war
with the United States and Great Britain."
The Kashikodokoro, Koreiden, and Shinden are located on the grounds of the Imperial
Palace and are sites of worship for, respectively, the Shinto deity Amaterasu, the souls of
past emperors, and spirits from across Japan.
In keeping with the spirit of the song of Takushoku University, Japan had never practiced
any form of racial discrimination throughout its history. Shikai mina doho (universal
brotherhood) and hakko ichiu (world unity) were principles which had been passed on byeach emperor to his successor.
Now, even members of the Japanese parliament are afraid to say the words "hakko ichiu".
Japanese dictionaries define hakko ichiu as, "A phrase which literally means 'eight cords,
one roof' and refers to world unity. It was a slogan used to justify Japanese overseas
expansionism at the time of World War II. It is based on a passage from the Nihon Shoki,
an ancient work of Japanese history, which reads, 'Thereafter, the Capital may be extended
so as to embrace all of the six cardinal points and the eight cords may be covered so as toform one roof.'"Japan's non-discriminatory administration
Japan fought alongside the Allies during World War I, and, as a result of their victory,
Japan was awarded control in 1920 of Palau, the Marshall Islands, and the Mariana Islandsof the Western Pacific including Saipan, Tinian, and Peleliu. These islands had been
territories of Spain since the sixteenth century, but were later ceded to Germany.
Following Japan's defeat in World War II, the mandates were transferred to America.

54

Even though Japan's administration of the islands lasted only a little over twenty years, theinhabitants still look fondly to Japan. In contrast to their previous European rulers, theJapanese did not discriminate against the islanders, but instead strived to improve theirlevel of education and standard of living.
Nowadays racial equality is a concept taken for granted by people around the world, butthat itself was the result of what Japan did during World War II.
Even if Japan had won the war, Japan would not have wantonly plundered from the nationsof Asia, unlike the Western powers.
Japan's administration of Taiwan and Korea proves this to be true.
Western colonies were characterized by a one-sided exploitation of the ruled by the rulers.
By contrast, Japanese governance brought Taiwan and Korea, both pre-modern societies,
into the modern world in a very short period of time.
In Taiwan and Korea, Japan implemented improvements in education and public welfare,built many new schools, hospitals, and railroads, repaired irrigation and flood control
infrastructure, and developed agriculture and industry. Japan invested a huge quantity ofmoney in Taiwan and Korea.
Japan also founded prestigious institutes for higher learning, Taipei Imperial University in
Taiwan and Keijo Imperial University in Korea. By contrast, Western powers neverestablished a single university in their colonies.
Before Japanese rule, Korean society was entirely stagnant under the rule of the corrupt
Joseon Dynasty. Joseon Korea proclaimed its independence as the Korean Empire in 1897,
just after Japan's victory in the First Sino-Japanese War, but prior to that it was a Chinese
tributary state. Because of this, Chinese influence impaired Korean political culture.
South Korean President Park Chung-hee lamented in one of his writings that, "To put itbriefly, in the last 5,000 years of history Korea has alternated between periods of stagnationand periods of retrogression. When I reflect on the history of my people, I cannot deny that
it is a sad story."
In 1981, President Chun Doo-hwan likewise mentioned, in a speech on National Liberation
Day, commemorating the end of Japanese rule over Korea, that "Koreans should not blame
Japan for the humiliation of having lost our national sovereignty. At the time we were aweak nation lacking in internal unity, and for that we have only ourselves to blame."
Taiwan and Korea were able to achieve such spectacular progress as a result of Japanfreeing them from the yoke of China.

55

If Korea had remained a Chinese tributary state, it would probably still today be at the samelevel of development as mainland China. If Korea had become a Russian colony, it would
probably be at a similar level of development as the former Soviet Republics of Central
Asia.
Korean support for the Japanese administration
We mustn't forget that Korean people under the Japanese administration were legally
Japanese citizens during World War II and were strongly supportive of the war effort.
In Japanese-ruled Korea, six of the thirteen provincial governors were Korean and so werea majority of the 218 subordinate county magistrates. Relative to Korea's population andland area, the number of police officers in Korea at this time was far fewer than the number
needed in Japanese-ruled Taiwan, Sakhalin Island, and the Liaodong Peninsula.
In the Japanese Army, many Koreans led Japanese soldiers as general officers or
high-ranking commissioned officers. There were also a great number of Koreans who wereawarded the Order of the Golden Kite, the most prestigious decoration bestowed tosoldiers.
By contrast, it would have been utterly improbable in European or American colonies forindigenous officers to outrank and command whites.
In 1938, when the Japanese Army instituted a volunteer enlistment system in Korea, there
was a flood of applicants, amounting within three years to forty-five times the enlistment
quota. When the Japanese Navy began accepting volunteers in Korea the next year, thenumber of applications was more than sixty-two times the enlistment quota. If Japan's ruleover Korea had really been so cruel, it is not likely Koreans would have cooperated to thisextent.
Starting in 1939, Koreans were permitted to change their names to Japanese names. Overeighty percent of Koreans rushed to select new names for themselves, whereas in Taiwan
only two percent did.
Today Koreans are taught that Japan robbed them of their identities by forcing them toadopt Japanese names, but this has no factual basis. There were Korean general officers,
high-ranking commissioned officers, and members of the Korean royal family who chose to
keep their Korean names.
Even in Japan, there are those who continue to insist that Japan apologize for its"colonization" of Taiwan and Korea, but it's strange how these same people never dare
criticize China's brutal “colonization” of Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and of the Uyghurs of
Xinjiang.

56

Koreans were never discriminated against in Japan. In 1932, Bak Chun-geum ran, under his
Korean name, as a candidate for the House of Representatives in the Tokyo 4th District(now the ward of Koto). He was ultimately elected to two terms, despite the fact that mostof the electorate was Japanese.
A photo of Bak Chun-geum, which was taken after he had won his first election, shows him
surrounded by a large group of kimono-clad women who are shouting cheers of "banzai!"
After the war, he served as an advisor to the Korean Residents Union in Japan.
Granted, Japan's lower classes did express some degree of contempt and discrimination
against Koreans in Japan. This was because ethnic Koreans who migrated to Japan from the
Korean peninsula outcompeted them for jobs.
It was the same situation in America of the late-1980s, when riots by African-Americans
consistently targeted Korean shops. This occurred because of the spread of “Korean towns”
in which Korean immigrants took low-paying jobs once held by African-Americans. Before
the growth of Korean immigrant communities, African-Americans attacked Jews for thesame reason.
If Japan had never been dragged into World War II, our judgment of Japan's administrationof Taiwan and Korea would probably be very different today.
The treatment of Native Americans and Africans by the white man
During the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War, Japan fought with and defeated Russia, apreeminent European empire. Japan's victory awakened the colored peoples of the world by
proving that even people of color could defeat a white empire in battle.
It was back in 1620, at the start of the seventeenth century, that the United States wasfounded by Puritans, who crossed the Atlantic Ocean to escape persecution and landed on
the eastern shores of North America.
The founders of America believed the vast North American wilderness was land given tothem by God, and they exploited everything they could lay their hands on. The Native
Americans were seen as little better than animals and were slaughtered.
Because this new land was theirs by Divine Right, European settlers in America felt free totake anything they pleased, including both the land and the lives of the people who
inhabited it. To them, the Native Americans were merely a sort of animal with a humanappearance.
The celebrated British author Cecil Chesterton (1879-1918) wrote in his book, "A Historyof the United States," that "None of the other founders of English colonies [in the New
World] had ever treated the Indians except as vermin to be exterminated as quickly as
possible."

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The Britannica International Encyclopedia states that "The formation and development of
the Thirteen Colonies of North America was undertaken with the understanding that Native
Americans would be 'cleansed' and African slaves would be 'imported'."According to research carried out in the United States, at the time that the Puritans landedon the east coast, there were three million Native Americans living in North America, butby the nineteenth century this figure had dropped to just 300,000.
Furthermore, even the very first European colonies in the United States used African slaves.
It is estimated that by the time of the release of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863,
over seven million black slaves had been abducted from Africa and forced to work in the
United States under horrible conditions.
Native Americans were not as docile, and therefore unsuitable as slaves. Africans could betransported more cheaply than horses or oxen, and they lived longer than either.
The internment of the Japanese-Americans
Immediately after the outbreak of war with the attack on Pearl Harbor, a single Executive
Order by the President designated over 120,000 Japanese-Americans with US citizenship as
enemy aliens. All of their hard-earned property was confiscated, and they were permitted tocarry with them only their personal belongings as they were herded into the internment
camps set up in ten remote locations across the United States.
This was a serious violation of the United States Constitution. German-Americans and
Italian-Americans, who were also descended from people of enemy nations, were neverinterned in the United States.
In the internment camps were row after row of horse stables and hastily constructed hovels
surrounded with barbed wire. The living conditions and sanitation were atrocious. From
atop the watchtowers, which were equipped with searchlights, American soldiers constantly
stood guard with rifles in hand.
In his book, "War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War," John Dower, afamous historian and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, described thefacilities where the Japanese-Americans were interned:[Japanese-Americans] were not merely driven from their homes and communities on theWest Coast and rounded up like cattle, but actually forced to live in facilities meant foranimals for weeks and even months before being moved to their final quarters in therelocation camps. In the state of Washington, two thousand Japanese-Americans werecrowded into a single filthy building in the Portland stockyard, where they slept on
gunnysacks filled with straw. In California, evacuees were squeezed into stalls in thestables at racetracks such as Santa Anita and Tanforan. At the Santa Anita assembly center,58

which eventually housed eighty-five hundred Japanese-Americans, only four days elapsed
between the removal of the horses and the arrival of the first Japanese-Americans; the only
facilities for bathing were the horse showers, and here as elsewhere the stench of manure
lingered indefinitely. Other evacuees were initially housed in horse or cattle stalls at various
fairgrounds. At the Puyallup assembly center in Washington (which was called Camp
Harmony), some were even lodged in converted pigpens."
Inhumane treatment of Japanese soldiers
Given that most white Americans despised the Japanese people, they did not see them as
fellow human beings. Therefore, they did not treat Japanese soldiers on the battlefield as
human beings either.
Charles Lindbergh became an American national hero in 1927 for being the first person to
fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean.
At the outbreak of World War II, Lindbergh volunteered for service with the rank ofcolonel. While fighting in the Pacific Theater, Lindbergh kept a detailed diary:
The sergeant saw no Jap to shoot, but members of the patrol took a prisoner. The Jap
prisoner was brought to the sergeant with the statement that here was his opportunity tokill a Jap.
'But I can't kill that man! He's a prisoner. He's defenseless.''Hell, this is war. We'll show you how to kill the son of a bitch.'
One of the patrol members offered the Jap a cigarette and a light, and as he started tosmoke an arm was thrown around his head and his throat 'slit from ear to ear.'
The entire procedure was thoroughly approved by the general giving the account. I was
regarded with an attitude of tolerant scorn and pity when I objected to the method... 'It's
the only way to handle them.'
The talk drifted to prisoners of war and the small percentage of Japanese soldiers taken
prisoner. 'Oh, we could take more if we wanted to,' one of the officers replied. 'But ourboys don't like to take prisoners.''We had a couple of thousand down at ----- , but only a hundred or two were turned in.
They had an accident with the rest. It doesn't encourage the rest to surrender when they
hear of their buddies being marched out on the flying field and machine guns turnedloose on them.''Or after a couple of them get shot with their hands up in the air,' another officer chimedin. (Diary entry of June 26, 1944.)59

I am shocked at the attitude of our American troops. They have no respect for death, thecourage of an enemy soldier, or many of the ordinary decencies of life. They think nothingwhatever of robbing the body of a dead Jap and call him a ‘son of a bitch’ while they do so.
I said during a discussion that regardless of what the Japs did, I did not see how we could
gain anything or claim that we represented a civilized state if we killed them by torture.
‘Well, some of our boys do kick their teeth in, but they usually kill them first,’ one of theofficers said in half apology.’ (Diary entry of June 28)
Our men think nothing of shooting a Japanese prisoner or a soldier attempting tosurrender. They treat the Jap with less respect than they would give to an animal, andthese acts are condoned by almost everyone. We claim to be fighting for civilization, but
the more I see of this war in the Pacific the less right I think we have to claim to be
civilized. (Diary entry of July 15)[The Japanese soldiers did not dare] to surrender even if they wished to, because theyknow only too well that our soldiers would shoot them on sight even if they came out
with their hands above their heads. (Diary entry of July 21)
In 1946, the American war correspondent Edgar Jones wrote in an article for "The Atlantic
Monthly" that American soldiers in the Pacific Theater had "shot prisoners in cold blood,
wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians... [and] boiled
the flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones
into letter openers."
In his book "Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War", the popular American
writer William Manchester also recounted an incident in which, "[The] orderly snatched up
a submachine gun and unforgivably massacred a line of unarmed Japanese soldiers who
had just surrendered."
John Dower, mentioned earlier, refers to other such incidents in his book. "A veteranreminisced before a class of students about how his unit had unexpectedly 'flushed' anisolated Japanese soldier on an island that had already been secured, and amusedthemselves by shooting at him as he dashed frantically about the clearing in search ofsafety... [The American soldier was] shooting a terrified old Okinawan woman and casuallydismissing her as 'just an old gook woman who wanted me to put her out of her misery.'"
The British historian Max Hastings included the following account of American atrocities
in Okinawa in his book "Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944–45". "Nemesis" is a goddess
from Greek mythology who administers divine punishment and retribution.
"Fighting in the midst of civilians is always repugnant, never more so than on Okinawa.
'On the ground,' [US infantryman] Chris Donner recorded one day, 'lay the body of a young
Okinawan, a girl who had been fifteen or sixteen, and probably very pretty. She was nude,60

lying on her back with arms outstretched and knees drawn up, but spread apart. The poor
girl had been shot through the left breast and evidently violently raped.' It seemed unlikelythat this was the work of Japanese soldiers. Not long after, several men of the infantry unit
which Donner was accompanying fell to fire from unseen enemies on a cliff top. Suddenly,
the Americans saw a Japanese woman clutching a baby... some shouted: 'Shoot the bitch,shoot the Jap woman!' There was a burst of fire. The woman fell, then struggled to her feetand staggered towards her baby. After more shots, she went down again and lay still."Japanese soldiers have never committed these sort of atrocities. Throughout history, Japan
has never practiced racial discrimination, engaged in massacres of whole cities, or usedslaves.
By contrast, eyewitness accounts of atrocities by American soldiers like the ones above areeasy to find. It was with good reason that, during the war, they were called "American
devils".
Truman’s and MacArthur’s racism
Harry Truman, who became President upon the death of Roosevelt, was a fervent racist.
Truman was frank and abrasive in the way he spoke. At the time he decided to drop atomic
bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he said to an aide, "When you have to deal with a beast
you have to treat him like a beast." Shortly after Japan surrendered, he described theJapanese people as "vicious and cruel savages".
Truman also despised both blacks and Jews. He boasted that no Jew or black man had everset foot on the front door of his home in Missouri.
At a cabinet meeting in 1946, Truman made derisive statements about the Jews, declaringthat "Jesus Christ couldn’t please them when he was here on earth, so how could anyone
expect that I would have any luck?"
General MacArthur was also a racist.
Major Faubion Powers, who was MacArthur's senior aide-de-camp during his time inTokyo, was riding with MacArthur in his private car as rain fell outside.
MacArthur reminisced to Powers about his last trip through Tokyo and told him, "It was
raining just like now... Something menacing and nefarious about the Japs."
In 1905, the last year of the Russo-Japanese War, MacArthur was brought by his father toJapan, who had travelled to Manchuria as a military observer, and stayed there for a short
time.

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MacArthur also loathed President Roosevelt. When speaking to an aide, he referred to him
as a Jew and deliberately misnamed him, calling him "Rosenberg". He called Truman "thatJew" and explained himself by saying, "You can tell by his name. Look at his face..." In
actual fact, neither Roosevelt nor Truman were Jewish.
In return, Roosevelt hated MacArthur. According to the memoirs of Herbert Hoover,
Roosevelt openly called him "McClelland" instead of MacArthur, and described him as his"problem child".
"Should the Japanese race be exterminated?"
In 1944, the United States was gripped by violent hatred of Japan.
That year, thirteen percent of respondents to a Gallup opinion poll supported theextermination of the Japanese race. From the outset Gallup had decided to include thequestion, "Should the Japanese race be exterminated?"
Documents show that, around the same time, President Roosevelt invited to the WhiteHouse cultural anthropologist Ales Hrdlicka, who worked at the Smithsonian Institution. It
is recorded that Roosevelt told Hrdlicka that the people of Japan should be forcibly
crossbred with the mild-tempered indigenous peoples of the South Pacific with the aim oftransforming the Japanese into a placid, harmless race.
Anti-black discrimination which outdid the Nuremberg Laws
I studied abroad in the United States during the late-1950s, during the height ofAfrican-American discrimination.
Although they were supposedly American citizens, their right to vote had been taken fromthem, and everything, including churches, schools, hotels, restaurants, buses, trains, lobbies,
public restrooms, and drinking fountains were strictly segregated into facilities for use bywhites and those for use by blacks. In the South, blacks were often lynched and cruelly
murdered by whites.
Those with one-eighth African-American ancestry or more were legally defined as being"black". This was an even harsher standard than the Nuremberg Laws, which were passedin Germany during the era of Nazi persecution of the Jews, which defined "Jews" as peopleof one-fifth Jewish ancestry or greater.
During World War II, Japan freed Asia from Western domination, and while theafter-effects spread to Africa, resulting in African nations, one after another, achieving their
independence, discrimination against African-Americans in the United States continued
unabated.

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Even so, when diplomats from newly-independent African nations took up their posts in
America, the United States did nothing to stop restaurants and hotels from discriminating
against them.
At that point, a great awakening occurred among the African-Americans of the UnitedStates. In the 1960s, a civil rights movement was launched under the leadership ofReverend Martin Luther King, which finally freed blacks from the burden of unjust
discrimination.
Until then, many states had laws criminalizing marriage or sexual relations between blacks
and whites. In 1967, these laws were finally abolished in the last three states upholdingthem.
After World War II, African-Americans were allowed to play in the major leagues for the
first time. Once limited to the role of caddies, in the 1970s they began to play golfalongside white players. They also were able to partake in tennis.
Without Japan, Tiger Woods would never have become an American hero, and theWilliams sisters would never have rocked the world of tennis. If Japan had not fought inWorld War II, President Obama may not have ever been born, and of course,
African-Americans, even today, would still be suffering under terrible discrimination.
Was racially segregated America really a democracy?
American propaganda depicted World War II as a battle between democratic America andmilitarist Japan. However, can we really describe the United States, a nation which
trampled on the rights of its own African-American citizens, as a democracy?
The achievement of many African-Americans in breaking through the race barrier was
made possible by Japanese soldiers who gave their lives on the field of battle and by
Japanese citizens who perished in the flames of war.
Japanese-Americans also endured numerous hardships in the United States.
During the period when I was travelling back and forth between Japan and the UnitedStates for work, I used to visit homes for senior Japanese-American citizens whenever I had
time. They were very grateful to receive the mementos and souvenirs I brought for them.
When I visited Washington in 1976, I received a White House invitation to attend a
ceremony at which President Gerald Ford would sign a new Executive Order, repealing the
Executive Order of 1941 that interned Japanese-Americans.
At the White House ceremony, President Ford surrounded himself with over twenty
Japanese-American leaders, including congressmen, while he signed the order. I was the63only Japanese citizen present among them and, not wanting to impose, I stood at the spot
nearest to the entranceway.
When we were served tea after the ceremony, I thanked the Japanese-Americans personally.
I told them that, "The reason why American citizens came to respect Japan after World War
II was certainly not due to anything Japan had done, but rather it was because of theunflinching efforts of Japanese-Americans like yourselves."

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Chapter 6 - The Japanese Army's "Spirit-First Policy""Repositioning" and "honorable deaths"
In August 1942, US Marines landed on the islands of Guadalcanal andneighboring Tulagi with a force of 19,000 soldiers.
The Battle of Guadalcanal was the Japanese Army's first defeat at the hands of the US
military since the outbreak of the war.
The Japanese garrison defending Tulagi was completely annihilated in one day's fighting.
Meanwhile a Japanese Navy construction unit was building an airfield on Guadalcanal. The
unit consisted of 2,200 men, but a majority of those were conscript laborers.
Japan's Imperial General Headquarters hastily dispatched a naval landing party of 500 men
strong plus army units 4,300 men strong, but the troop strength of the attacking American
force had been badly underestimated and the Japanese were defeated. The Japanese Army's
standard tactic of mass bayonet charges proved disastrous in the face of the US Marines'
overwhelming advantage in firepower.
Of the 916 Japanese soldiers who attacked the US military position, 777 were killed inaction. Only 126 Japanese soldiers made it back to their bases alive, while the US Marines
had lost 40 soldiers.
In October, Imperial General Headquarters recognized the gravity of the situation and sentin the 2nd Division. The men of the 2nd Division traversed the island's unexplored jungles
in order to make an all-out frontal assault on the American position, but the result wasanother devastating defeat.
The 38th Division was also deployed to Guadalcanal, but seven of its eleven transport
vessels were sunk before reaching the island. Only 2,000 men made it ashore and all theirartillery had been lost.
The United States gained supremacy of the air and sea around Guadalcanal which made it
almost impossible to bring in rations. Many Japanese soldiers died of starvation.
Finally, Imperial General Headquarters decided to abandon Guadalcanal and withdrew its
forces between January and February of the following year. At the time of the official
announcement, instead of calling it a "retreat", the word "repositioning" (tenshin in
Japanese) was used for the first time.

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Since August, Japan had brought a total of 31,404 soldiers to Guadalcanal, but only 10,652
of those managed to withdraw successfully. Over 20,000 had perished through combat or
starvation.
Throughout this period, fighting continued to rage on the vast island of New Guinea
between the Japanese and the armies of the United States and Australia. In December 1942,
Japanese forces in New Guinea had been decimated in fighting around the village ofBasabua, losing 800 men in battle. In the following January, Japanese forces were again
crushed at Buna, and then, following a fierce fight, withdrew from Giruwa as well.
Between Buna and Giruwa the Japanese had lost 7,600 soldiers in combat.
On May 12, 1943, 12,000 American soldiers landed in Attu, one of the Aleutian Islands,
under cover of an array of aircraft carriers, battleships, and cruisers.
About 2,500 Japanese soldiers defended Attu, and on May 29, the remainder of these madean all-out suicide charge against US forces.
The next day, Imperial General Headquarters officially announced that, "The defenders ofAttu Island had been in an extremely difficult situation since May 12, fighting a non-stop,
bloody battle against a vastly numerically superior foe. However, on the night of May 29,
they decided to show the enemy the true spirit of the Imperial Army by launching a final
blow against the enemy main force. All the remaining defenders made a bold and heroic
attack on the enemy. After this, all communications ceased and we assume that every man
met an honorable death. Even the sick and wounded, who were unable to participate in theattack, had all committed suicide in advance."
This was the first time that Imperial General Headquarters had used the phrase "honorable
death", which is pronounced gyokusai in Japanese and literally means "shattered jewel".
The newspaper Asahi Shimbun praised the last stand of the defenders of Attu in an article
which read, "The word 'gyokusai' neatly sums up the attitude towards life and death of thepeople of Japan, who, valuing their reputations more than their lives, would give up theirlives to live honorably. The heroic destruction of the 'War God Unit' on Attu is the very
definition of 'gyokusai', an amazing exploit which will be remembered for ten thousand
years."
The article explained that, "The word 'gyokusai' derives from a passage in the Book ofNorthern Qi's biography of Yuan Jingan, composed at the end of the Six Dynasties periodof Chinese history. The passage reads, 'A real man would rather be a shattered jewel than acomplete roof tile.' 'Gyokusai' means that it is better to die a gallant and honorable death inservice to the state, respected by all like the beautiful light reflected off a jewel. The
alternative is to lead a life without achieving anything, emitting no light like a roof tile."
The article mentioned that, "We often see the same idea in the words and deeds of the great66

men of our own nation's past", and then proceeded to quote the poetry of Saigo Takamori
and the prison writings of Yoshida Shoin.
The Japanese Army and Navy lost every battle they fought from the time of the Battle of
Attu onwards.
On Attu and on all the other islands after that whose defenders met honorable deaths, theJapanese fought to the last with no hope of resupply or reinforcement. Having lost controlof the sea and air, not even a single rice ball could make it to the defending garrison intact.
What could Japanese officers have been thinking in the face of such overwhelming
American firepower?
In November, 20,000 American soldiers landed on Cape Torokina of Bougainville Island,
which is on the east side of New Guinea. They routed a Japanese Army surveillance teamconsisting of over two hundred men.
A single regiment composed of 1,200 Japanese soldiers was speedily dispatched to repulse
the Americans. Bougainville Island's total land area is over one quarter that of Hokkaido.
After the regiment went ashore, it trudged through fifty kilometers of unexplored jungle
and two of its members were eaten by crocodiles while crossing a river. Then the regimentlaunched a bold night-time attack on US forces, employing the bayonet charges which were
the Japanese Army's speciality.
According to Senshi Sosho, the history of the war compiled by the Japanese Defense
Ministry's Military History Office, the regimental commander Colonel Hamanoe Toshiaki
wrote the following concerning the battle:"Enemy resistance was stiff and the fighting was just getting fiercer. We were unable toadvance even one step. During typical fighting in China, resistance was also stiff at first,
but when we kept pushing they gave way. Our current predicament seemed completely
different from fighting the Chinese Army. The enemy mortars delivered a nonstop barrageof concentrated fire. We divided up the Japanese Army's battlefield and marked our maps
with the appropriate numbers indicating depth and width. In short order the enemy fired
hundreds of shells at the area we had marked out with numbers, and kept on firing so
intensely that not even a single mouse could have survived. So intense was its power and so
grand was its scale, we did not even have the strength to advance. If we stayed there ourcasualties would have risen rapidly and we would have had to accept our annihilation as
inevitable. We had no choice but to endure the shame and transfer our units outside of theeffective firing range of the enemy mortars so that we could regroup our forces, replenish
our ammunition, and prepare a counterattack."

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The word "transfer" meant "retreat". Colonel Hamanoe had decided to withdraw and his
regiment abandoned the battlefield.
The Japanese Army abhorred the word "retreat" and refused to use it. The Army was
closing its eyes to reality out of an obsession of avoiding bad omens. In the Army, a retreat
was either a "transfer" or a "repositioning".
The Type 38 Arisaka rifle and the firepower gap
The US Army landed on the island of Tinian on July 23.
The island's 4,000 Japanese defenders, including both army and navy units, launched aclose-quarter attack on US Marines on the 25th. The attack ended in failure at the cost of
1,241 men killed in action.
The commander of the 1st Air Fleet deployed at Tinian, Kakuta Kakuji, telegraphed the
Navy General Staff on July 27 and reported on the power differential between the US andJapanese militaries.
"The Americans keep a close eye on their positions which are studded with acoustic
locators and barbed-wire entanglements. As soon as they detect our approach they hailwithering fire on us from their tanks, mortars, and automatic firearms, and as we advancefurther they make extensive use of flamethrowers. Then their ship cannons and groundcannons surrounding us rain down an endless stream of flares all night long. They are notsparing in their use of every kind of shell, and are firing shots into the air. (Starting fromthe day before the start of the landing, the whole of Tinian has been hit with probably no
fewer than 3,000 such shells each night and somewhere between 600 or 1,000 shells were
fired at our headquarters on Mt. Lasso alone.) There are a huge number of obstacles fornight-time operations. After the failure of our Army's night attack on the 25th, theregimental commander said, while shedding bitter tears, 'As great as our men's bravery was,the enemy's equipment was greater.'"
The Japanese defenders of Tinian met honorable deaths on August 3.
Whereas the US military made liberal use of ammunition, the Japanese Army compensatedfor its lack of firepower through sheer strength of spirit. The Japanese Army fought withforce of will rather than force of matter.
Against the Japanese Army's Type 38 Arisaka rifles, the US Army had automatic rifles.
The Type 38 was developed in 1905 during the Russo-Japanese War.
The Type 38 could fire up to five rounds before needing to be reloaded. It was put to use
for the first time during Japan's siege of Tsingtao, which was a German leased territory at
the time of World War I.

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Of course, Japanese soldiers did not fight their battles exclusively with the Type 38.
Japanese infantry units also had equipment like light machine guns, heavy machine guns,
grenade launchers, infantry support guns, and automatic cannons, but compared with the
US Army, the Japanese had fewer weapons and less ammunition. Whereas the US Armyblanketed an entire area with a barrage of firepower, the Japanese Army fired only at
specific spots. Battles between the US and Japanese Armies were battles of points versus
two dimensional space.
Later, when the US Army landed on Luzon of the Philippines, they airdropped a great
quantity of propaganda leaflets on the Japanese Army. The leaflets included a photo of theType 38 Arisaka rifle and the following message.
"As you are all aware, the Type 38 Arisaka rifle which you are using made its debut as a
cutting-edge weapon back in 1905, at the time of the Russo-Japanese War, when it replaced
the Murata rifle. However, that was forty years ago. People throughout the world know
well that, since then, every country has been competing aggressively in the field of
scientific research and great strides have been made in the production of scientificweaponry. So why is it that you are still being forced to fight against automatic firearms
with lever-action rifles? If you had been fighting with both your martial spirit and theadvanced weaponry belonging to the US Army, then perhaps you might have avoided
disastrous defeats like the one you suffered at Leyte. No matter how strong your spirits are,how could you ever fight back against a Consolidated 500-kilogram bomb with a Type 38
rifle?""Consolidated" refers to the bombers built by America's Consolidated Aircraft Corporation.
The Type 38 Arisaka rifle was the backbone of an army which valued bayonet charges
more than anything.
In 2009, two television programs, Fuji TV's "This Concerns Me!" and TBS's "MinoMonta's Morning Straight Talk", broadcast features on how the Japanese Army's old rifles
have been used to treat patients at Showa, a long-term care facility in Kasukabe, Saitama
Prefecture.
The staff at Showa showed models of the old Type 38 rifle to elderly men suffering fromdementia, but though they had been unable to even stand on their own two feet up to then,they immediately rose up, slung the model gun over their shoulders, and started to walk.
According to the TV programs, the facility henceforth found models of the Type 38 rifle tobe useful in the treatment of dementia.
The ammunition gap and the Japanese Army's famed close combat tactics
On every battlefield, the Japanese Army employed the exact same hand-to-hand combat
tactics it had been using since the time of the Russo-Japanese War.

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In April 1945, in preparation for the decisive battle on the mainland, the Army Section ofImperial General Headquarters distributed a pamphlet called the "Citizens' Resistance
Manual", which noted that, "Not only guns and bayonets, but everything from swords,
spears, and bamboo pikes up to sickles, hatchets, bushhammers, carving knives, andfiremen's hooks can be used as weapons in close quarters combat."
The Japanese Army expected that, when the Americans arrived, ordinary civilians would
also be taking part in close quarters combat. A bushhammer is a steel hammer used to breakstones and a firemen's hook is a rod with a steel hook attached to the tip used to smash
things.
Up to the day Japan surrendered, infantrymen were the core of the Japanese Army andclose combat was considered the decisive element determining the outcome of a battle. The
Japanese adopted a "spirit-first policy" which emphasized the Army's fighting spirit above
all else.
Before American soldiers went ashore, they pummeled the target islands with a withering
bombardment using their carrier-based aircraft, battleships, cruisers, and destroyers. Mostof the land area of the islands was entirely within their firing range, and so the Japanese
defenders had to endure a fierce, relentless onslaught of fire from the sea.
The quantity of ammunition carried by an American battleship was equivalent to theammunition carried by five Japanese Army divisions. An ammunition stockpile so large
would have been unthinkable in the Japanese Army.
All throughout the night, streams of flares lit up the sky as if it were broad daylight. For
this reason, it was challenging for the Japanese soldiers even to move out of their dugouts.
Starting on June 13, 1944, an American task force consisting of seven battleships, elevencruisers, and twenty-six destroyers commenced a three-day bombardment of the islands ofSaipan and Tinian. Then on the 15th the first wave of US Marines landed on Saipan.
The island's garrison, composed of Japanese Army and Navy units, put up a stout defense,
but on July 5, Vice Admiral Nagumo Chuichi, commander of the Central Pacific Area Fleet,and Lieutenant General Saito Yoshitsugu, overall army commander in the Northern
Marianas, jointly ordered a final all-out attack.
The order started with, "(1.) Though the invasion of the American devils remains in fullswing, all units have shown them on this day what our strength and fighting spirit are reallycapable of. (2.) The defenders of Saipan shall assemble at the locations indicated inadvance, and on the 7th, the day after tomorrow, shall advance to attack the American
devils. We are resolved to all die honorable deaths, taking out ten enemy for every one of
us."

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On the 6th, the time came for the garrison to carry out its last charge. A briefing was
handed to the soldiers in the name of Vice Admiral Nagumo, and the following declaration
was telegraphed to Imperial General Headquarters.
"The men of the Imperial Army, Navy, and Air Services stationed on the whole island, as
well as the civilian employees, have fought well and bravely, and they have successfully
worked together as a united force. Everywhere they have done justice to the honor of theImperial Army... The true value of men of the Empire is that we choose the proper time toeither live or die... Now we shall strike the US Army with one great blow and shall cover
the island of Saipan with their bones to block their advance in the Pacific..."Nagumo sent a final parting telegram to Imperial General Headquarters which read,"Though the garrison has fought bravely, and has put as much effort and strength into thebattle as possible, ultimately it had no effect. All our forces will charge the enemy with
their highest-ranking officers at the vanguard. We shall show them the true worth of theImperial Army." After that, all communication ceased.
"Banzai charges" and the valor of Japanese soldiers
The US Army referred to the final "honorable death" attacks of the Japanese as "banzai
charges". US Army documents show that the Japanese Army left behind 4,311 corpses
during the banzai charge referred to above.
The total number of Japanese soldiers killed in action during the Battle of Saipan reached
41,244. On the other side, the US Army suffered 3,441 dead and 11,465 wounded.
Half of the roughly 20,000 Japanese residents of Saipan were also killed in battle.
Between June 19 and 20, three Japanese Navy aircraft carriers were sunk and one wasdamaged during the Battle of the Philippine Sea. As a result, the Japanese Navy lost thecapacity to engage in carrier battles.
On June 21, the US Army landed on Guam with the support of a force of twelve aircraft
carriers, six battleships, nine cruisers, and fifty-seven destroyers.
According to America's official history of the Pacific Theater, US forces fired 16,214 shells
at the island in the three days prior to the landing.
The 19,000 Japanese soldiers defending Guam engaged the Americans, but as early as July
24, three days after the US Army had landed, their commander Lieutenant General Obata
Hideyoshi sent the following farewell telegram to the Imperial General Headquarters:"The Army wants a single decisive battle utilizing all of our troop strength to take place on
the night of the 25th against the enemy's main force. Although there is a very big gap in the71quantity of resources available to the enemy and our own, I have an absolute, unshakeablefaith in the spiritual power of our brave and loyal imperial soldiers."
The briefings and the parting telegrams of the Japanese Army contained a lot of flowery
rhetoric referring to "the honor of the Imperial Army," "the true value of men of the
Empire," and "the true worth of the Imperial Army". Today Japanese people are quite easily
intoxicated with buzzwords and phrases like "peace," "pacifist constitution," "protection of
the constitution," and "United Nations".
On September 15, 49,000 American soldiers went ashore on the island of Peleliu. They
outnumbered the Japanese garrison five-fold.
On that tiny island, there were just 10,500 Japanese soldiers, holed up in caves and dugouts.
They fought against the Americans with steely determination for seventy-three days until
they all met honorable deaths on November 25.
The United States expected that it could capture Peleliu in three or four days.
Chester Nimitz, the Commander in Chief of the United States Pacific Fleet who led theoperation to capture Peleliu, commented in his memoirs that, "overcoming the intricate
defenses of Peleliu cost the attackers the highest combat casualty rate (nearly 40 per cent)of any amphibious assault in American history."
Everywhere it fought, the battlefield performance of the Japanese Army was spectacular.
Out of admiration for the bravery of Japan's soldiers, Fleet Admiral Nimitz himself
composed a poem which is today engraved on a stone monument on the island of Peleliu.
"Tourists from every country who visit this island should be told how courageous andpatriotic were the Japanese soldiers who all died defending this island. Pacific Fleet
Command Chief (USA) C.W. Nimitz"
The meaning of fighting in order to die
The US Army could not possibly have understood the state of mind of Japanese soldiers.
American soldiers fought in order to survive, but, as unbelievable as it was to theAmericans, Japanese soldiers fought in order to die.
Professor Donald Keene is a leading authority on Japanese literary studies and a recipientof Japan's prestigious Order of Culture. He studied at the US Navy Japanese Language
School during World War II and was involved in translating interrogation records ofJapanese POWs as well as letters and documents taken from the corpses of Japanesesoldiers in the Pacific Theatre.

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Professor Keene wrote in his book Meeting with Japan that, "The diaries often spoke of
Guadalcanal as 'Starvation Island.' As I read the diaries of men who were suffering such
hardships, it was impossible not to be moved. By contrast, the letters of the American
sailors I had to censor once a week revealed no ideals, and certainly no suffering, but only
their reiterated desire to return to their former lives... Throughout the war this contrast
haunted me - the consecration of the Japanese to their cause and the total indifference ofmost Americans to anything except returning home... I could not help but feel admiration
for the ordinary Japanese soldiers, and in the end I came to believe that the Japanese reallydeserved to win the war."
In Keene's book, The Heroic Symphony of the Battlefield: My Experiences in the War
between the United States and Japan, he states that, "I consider the Japanese soldiers, who
never complained about anything, to be truly commendable. By contrast the American
soldiers just whined about how 'The movie today was boring', 'The cigarettes are awful', or'I want to go home early.' In none of their letters did I ever see a word about their hopes andideals, like the objective of the war being to bring democracy to Japan." American soldiers,
he writes, did not "hold noble ideas" like Japanese soldiers did.
The Kamikaze Special Attack Units
Peleliu was the island closest to the Philippines, and after it fell, the Philippines were next.
On October 17, a fleet of 314 American ships, including aircraft carriers and battleships,
assembled in the sea east of the island of Leyte in the Philippines. They were accompaniedby 420 transport vessels. Three thousand two hundred land-based aircraft and 1,200
carrier-based aircraft also joined the attack.
The Japanese Navy's 1st Air Fleet, which was in charge of the Philippines at the time, hadalready been depleted by previous battles. In terms of usable aircraft, it had thirty-five Zerofighters, and less than one hundred aircraft in total even if we include other sorts of aircraft
such as its twelve Tenzan torpedo planes and Ginga torpedo plane/bombers.
By this point in time, most of Japan's experienced pilots had been killed in action. In theNavy, Japanese pilots spent an average of about three hundred hours in the air, whereas in
the Army it was only two hundred hours. A qualified pilot is said to require five hundred
hours of flying time.
The commander of the 1st Air Fleet, Vice Admiral Onishi Takijiro, has been called "thefather of the kamikaze".
Onishi believed that the only remaining option to turn the tides of the war was to use
kamikaze pilots, who could sink one enemy ship with one plane by crashing themselves
into it.

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On October 20, Sublieutenant Seki Yukio received an order to constitute a unit. The orderstated: "Refer to this attack group as a Kamikaze Special Attack Unit." He took off at thehead of eight other aircraft from Mabalacat Airfield, which is on Luzon, eighty kilometers
north of Manila. They were the first kamikaze.
Today, amidst the remains of Mabalacat Airfield, there stands a stone monument which
was erected by local Filipinos. The inscription on the monument reads, "Sublieutenant Seki
Yukio, who became the world's first official human bomb, took off at this location."
The day Sublieutenant Seki first flew out of Mabalacat Airfield was two years and elevenmonths from the day, at the start of the war, that Sugiyama Hajime, the Chief of the Army
General Staff, had prayed at Kyoto's Iwashimizu Hachiman Shrine "that we would see thiswar through to its end without needing the help of the divine wind of the Gods." InJapanese, kamikaze literally means "divine wind".
Iwashimizu Hachiman Shrine was constructed during Japan's Heian Period (794-1185) as a
Shinto shrine to protect the southwest side of Kyoto. The Shrine was the subject of a story
in Yoshida Kenko's literary masterpiece Essays in Idleness, and its official shrine rank wasequal to that of Japan's famous Ise Grand Shrine.
Prime Minister Tojo Hideki is well known for saying, at the time of the outbreak of the war,"Once in his life a man will find it necessary to leap from the veranda of Kiyomizu
Temple." The main building of Kiyomizu Temple in Kyoto has a high veranda overlooking
a deep valley. It was constructed at a high altitude so that visitors would have to exert
themselves climbing the steep slope of the mountain.
A war without an exit strategy
During the Russo-Japanese War, Japan's national leaders went to war only after careful
deliberation on their means for ending the conflict. By contrast, when Japan launched into
war against the United States, none of Japan's leaders had any idea on what their exit
strategy would be. By that point in time, Japan was in too desperate a situation to be able tothink straight.
On October 20, a huge force of over 200,000 American soldiers began landing on the islandof Leyte.
Between October 23 and 26, the Japanese Navy deployed all its remaining sea power in the
Battle of Leyte Gulf.
During the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the Japanese Navy lost, in quick succession, four aircraft
carriers, three battleships including the Musashi, six heavy cruisers, four light cruisers,
eleven destroyers, and five submarines. These were the heaviest losses ever suffered by anation in modern naval history.

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The United States lost three of its thirty-two aircraft carriers deployed off Leyte, the USS
Princeton, the USS Gambier Bay, and the USS St. Lo, as well as three destroyers. All were
sunk by kamikaze attacks.
However, none of this altered the outcome of the war.
From then until the end of the war in August 1945, 2,531 Japanese Navy servicemen and
1,417 Japanese Army servicemen flew on kamikaze missions and never returned.
These figures do not include the flight crews who deliberately crashed their planes into
American B-29 bombers over the skies of Japan.
The B-29 bombers flew at an altitude of more than 10,000 meters, and Japanese fighters
were unable to reach such heights in order to confront them unless they lightened theiraircraft by removing weapons such as their machine guns. Japan did not even have any
antiaircraft guns with a range of over 5,000 meters. Thus, there was no choice for the pilots
but to fly their planes straight into the B-29s.
And yet despite this, Japanese airmen volunteered, one after another, boarding theirunarmed interceptor planes and soaring high into the sky. It took them over one hour of
flying time to reach an altitude of 10,000 meters.
After the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the Japanese Navy completely lost its capacity to challenge
the supremacy of the US Navy.

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Chapter 7 - Why Do We Praise The Kamikaze?
Soviet suicide planes and German Sondercommando
In 2002, I wrote the book Kamikaze: Japan's Suicide Gods in English and had it publishedthrough Longman, the United Kingdom's largest publishing firm. Longman is known as the
publisher favored by Winston Churchill.
My intention in writing the book was to spread awareness abroad about Japanese culture
and modern history by taking up the story of the world-famous Kamikaze Special Attack
Units.
What I especially wanted the world to understand was that World War II was not a war of
aggression provoked by Japan.
I was concerned that if I wrote the book alone it would be dismissed as Japanese
propaganda, and so, in order to ensure that the book would be read by as many foreign
readers as possible, I asked the American military history writer Albert Axell to be theco-writer. Mr. Axell has been a close friend of mine for the last forty years.
Mr. Axell contributed three chapters to the book dealing with the suicide planes of theSoviet Air Force, German kamikaze-style Special Forces (called Sondercommando inGerman), and the suicide missions of British planes protecting Arctic convoys during
World War II.
During the early stages of World War II on the Eastern Front, Stalin responded to bombing
raids by the German Air Force on the Soviet capital of Moscow by ordering the Soviet Air
Force to form suicide units.
In June 1941, Second Lieutenant Leonid Butelin became the first fighter pilot to killhimself by crashing his own plane into a German Junkers 88 bomber. Kamikaze aviators
were certainly not a Japanese invention. According to Soviet announcements, over threehundred German planes were downed as a result of Soviet suicide attacks.
The Sondercommando, employed by Nazi Germany in the final stages of World War II,
were inspired by the Japanese kamikaze. Germany formed these units by asking forvolunteers to crash their own planes into Allied bombers. The Elbe Sondercommando wasformed by about three hundred volunteers.
In March 1945, 1,300 Allied bombers, protected by 800 fighters, invaded the skies above
Desau on the Elbe River in Germany.

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They were intercepted by the Elbe Sondercommando, consisting of 183 aircraft, mostly
Messerschmitt 109s. The Elbe Sondercommando attempted to smash themselves into the
Allied aircraft, but only succeeded in downing a few of them. Most of the suicide planes
were shot down, and only fifteen aircraft survived the attack.
That was the Sondercommando's first and last battle. Germany later surrendered in May.
The worldwide readership of Kamikaze: Japan's Suicide Gods
Kamikaze: Japan's Suicide Gods sold well in the United States, and was subsequently
translated into Spanish, Danish, Finnish, and Estonian. I donated a copy of each language
edition to the Bansei Kamikaze Peace Museum in the city of Minamisatsuma, Kagoshima
Prefecture. The museum put all five of these books on display.
Bansei is one of the three largest sand dunes in Japan and is known for Fukiage Beach.
Between 1943 and 1944, local residents worked together to construct the Army's last air
base here.
During the Battle of Okinawa, Bansei was the kamikaze base closest to the beleaguered
island.
Almost two hundred kamikaze, including young pilots just seventeen or eighteen years ofage, took off from Bansei towards Okinawa.
I wrote Kamikaze: Japan's Suicide Gods on the basis of numerous interviews with thepeople involved, as well as with the documents, letters, and photographs they provided tome.
I heard many moving stories. The families of the young kamikaze pilots, who were
informed in advance about their missions, came to Bansei Air Base or Chiran Air Basefrom all across the country in order to see them off for the last time.
However, because the railroads throughout Japan had been torn to pieces by American
aerial bombing and naval bombardments, it took families in Hokkaido and northern Japan
many days to reach the air bases in southern Japan.
In order to protect them from enemy air strikes, the kamikaze planes were concealed inlocations some distance from the air base. When the time to attack drew close, students of
the local girls' schools, who had been mobilized for public labor, removed the camouflage
nets from the planes, and their pilots took the controls.
The kamikaze pilots started up their engines with a roar, and then, as they left the taxiway
one by one, they saw all their family members gathered at the side of the runway.

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There was one pilot who lifted up his plane's canopy and held out in one hand a stick with ared piece of cloth tied to it. He had told his family about this in advance, so that they would
know in which plane he was flying.
Even the residents of the town, including the town mayor, were lined up together with thefamily members to see off the kamikaze pilots.
Once all the kamikaze planes were lined up on the runway, the family members, townsfolk,
female students, and ground crew all shouted banzai at the top of their lungs. Some in thecrowd shouted out the names of their husband, son, or brother.
The evening before, a father who had come from northern Japan removed the string fromone side of the Japanese short-coat he was wearing and handed it over to his son, who was
now in the cockpit of a kamikaze plane. It was a symbol of the eternal bond between afather and son.
The Battle of Okinawa took place while the cherry blossoms in Kyushu were in full bloom.
Just before the kamikaze pilots got into their planes, the students from the girls' schools had
filled up the cockpits with cherry blossom branches they had picked.
Amidst cheers of banzai, the kamikaze planes took off one by one. Once fully airborne,
they circled around above the air base one time, as if hesitant to leave, and then soared
towards Okinawa.
The family members waved towards the kamikaze planes as they became mere dots on thehorizon. As if half-mad, they stood there waving, long after the planes had disappeared
from the sky.
At that moment, the petals of cherry blossoms floated down through the air like snow.
The kamikaze pilots had lifted up the canopies of their planes, and the cherry blossoms
loaded into their cockpits had been blown out and scattered by the wind.
The Banda Unit and the Fugaku Unit
There is a famous photograph of a group of five young pilots smiling while petting a puppy
dog just before leaving on a mission. Many people believe that this group left from Chiran
Air Base, but in fact they took off from Bansei Air Base.
Among the documents I received was a personal, handwritten account of Lieutenant
General Tominaga Kyoji, who was in charge of the Japanese Army's kamikaze units in thePhilippines. He wrote the account at the request of the Japanese Defense Ministry's Military
History Office.

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Lieutenant General Tominaga took up his post as commander of the 4th Air Army in
Manila just two months before the US Army attacked the Philippines in October of 1944.
The Japanese Army's first kamikaze units, the Banda Unit and the Fugaku Unit, wereformed under his auspices and sent into action in Leyte Gulf in November.
I shall quote from Lieutenant General Tominaga's account at length. The Japanese word
banda refers to the branches of a cherry tree heavy with blossoms, and the word fugaku is
another name for Mt. Fuji.
"I was the one who came up with the names of the kamikaze units including 'banda' and'fugaku'. It was presumptuous of me to have named them myself, and it probably would
have been more appropriate for me to have let the members of the kamikaze units selectnames of their own preference... Some of the kamikaze units dispatched from the Imperial
General Headquarters did not volunteer but rather had simply been called upon. They
seemed to have mentally prepared themselves to become kamikaze while on their way to
the Philippines from their departure points in Japan. Even so, there were a few who simply
couldn't bring themselves to be kamikaze and who were unwilling to voluntarily fly off totheir deaths. I couldn't blame them for that. It was not that they had had a change of heart, it
was that they had been ordered to die regardless of their wishes. It was a truly sad choice tomake... In December of 1944, during air operations accompanying the enemy landing on
Mindoro, a part of the 5th Air Brigade of heavy bombers unanimously resolved to become
kamikaze against the attack of the enemy fleet. They would die heroic deaths as the'Kikusui Unit'. They went aboard their kamikaze planes. At the time they had all boldly
volunteered, it seemed quite pitiable to have left anyone behind, but even so a unit
commander should not thoughtlessly kill his valuable subordinates. The unit commander
should have shown more courage and resolutely prevented any more than the minimum
number of personnel from boarding the kamikaze planes. On this matter, I blame myself for
not having effectively communicated my intentions... The Kamikaze pilots had the purehearts of heroes and the noble spirits of the Gods. The dignity they exhibited had no equal.
However, once they had finally managed to prepare themselves mentally, their shoulders
were burdened with the great mission they had to fulfill, and it seems they then wanted togo forward as soon as possible in order to achieve their cherished objective. In the sameway, I realized that the unit commanders assigned to them worried day and night about how
to put the kamikaze to effective use, and for this reason tended to use them too early. I also
got that general feeling just by observing their behavior. We have to take these
psychological trends into sufficient consideration in order to seize good opportunities andavoid misusing our personnel."
Lieutenant General Tominaga left the Philippines in March 1945 and returned to Tokyo by
way of Taiwan. In July, he was appointed commander of the newly constituted 139th
Division in Manchuria. After the end of the war, Tominaga was detained in Siberia by theSoviet Army and was eventually repatriated to Japan in 1955.

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Here is another excerpt from Tominaga's account:"I felt sincerely grateful for the Army's special treatment of the kamikaze units, and for the
sympathy and kind treatment given them on the part of Japanese society. And yet, I cannot
forget that I also felt deep shame at how differently the kamikaze were treated from theother pilots, who by and large were also certain to be killed in combat during their
missions."
Tominaga offered the following words of advice on what Japan should do in case it mustagain resort to kamikaze tactics in a time of war:
"When that time comes, we need in particular to select a leader with nerves of steel, inother words a commander who will stay the course with this grim strategy without
suffering a nervous breakdown from the pain and stress he undergoes."In his capacity as commander of kamikaze units, Tominaga lamented that, "I feel so deeply
ashamed about my own errors and lack of consideration." In the following passage, hecommits to paper some of his deepest regrets:"I should have asked the Army Minister to grant a standing audience with the Emperor tothe members of kamikaze units formed in the Tokyo area. If possible, I think that it would
have been reasonable to work to have that honor granted to all the members of kamikaze
units, not just the ones formed in Tokyo. At the center of their pure hearts, our kamikaze
heroes truly thought only of their Emperor and country. I wanted to crown these young,noble gods with the honor of an imperial audience, and if we had just asked the Emperor,
probably he would have granted the request immediately. The blame for this failure lies
solely with me."The unalloyed patriotism of the kamikaze
I don't believe there was any need for the Emperor to have met with and personallyencouraged the kamikaze pilots.
In the English-language book, Kamikaze: Japan's Suicide Gods, I did not make use of theaccount of Lieutenant General Tominaga because I wanted to record the kamikaze pilots'
unembellished thoughts about their native country.
Tominaga's eldest son Yasushi was studying at Keio University when he became a memberof the Japanese Army Air Service. In May 1945, he was sent on a kamikaze mission to
Okinawa, where he died a hero.
Japan had employed kamikaze for the first time in the Philippines in October 1944 as atactic to weather a critical emergency.

80Despite this, the use of kamikaze evolved from an expediency to a strategy in January 1945
when Imperial General Headquarters presented the Emperor with the report, "Overview of
the Strategic Plan of the Imperial Army and Navy".
At the time he first resolved to utilize kamikaze tactics, Vice Admiral Onishi Takijiro said,"Kamikaze attacks are a heresy of command." And yet, they were adopted as a national
strategy.
I have read the diaries and personal writings of a great number of kamikaze pilots. I am
convinced that the overwhelming majority of these young men volunteered to be kamikaze.
Student soldiers wrote an especially large number of the surviving personal accounts. They
grappled with the prospect of death in a serious manner. They agonized and vacillated,
before finally resolving to volunteer for a kamikaze mission. The young people of thosetimes thought about their lives in a far more serious manner than the youth of today.
Many kamikaze pilots volunteered out of sheer patriotism.
One student soldier wrote in his diary that, "The only option for Japan is a voluntarystrategy of using our strength of self-sacrifice and patriotism in order to compensate for ourweakness in all material matters, including manufacturing power, science, and equipment."
There were many such people who believed that the kamikaze were Japan's only chance toturn the tides. The idea was to pit Japan's spiritual power against America's material power
and to destroy one American ship for every one Japanese plane, thus stymieing the enemy's
offensive and reversing the course of the war.
Alternatively, there were also those who decided to willingly sacrifice themselves in thehopes of inflicting losses on the enemy forces so great that they would sign a favorable
peace agreement with Japan. Some made up their mind to become kamikaze in order toprotect their loved ones, family members, or fellow citizens from the American devils.
Japan's highly educated common people
I read through the last words, wills, posthumous poems, and farewell letters to family
members of not only student soldiers, but also of kamikaze from lower class commoner
backgrounds and kamikaze who were just seventeen or eighteen years of age at the time of
their final missions. As I did this, I came to realize that Japanese people then wereconsiderably better educated than those of today.
The Japanese people of the time understood the fact that they had been victims of unjust
American persecution and interference, even though Japan had never posed any harm toAmerican interests, and thus had no choice but to fight the war.

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Concerning the war between China and Japan, they were also fully aware that it was
China's repeated, illegal provocations which had caused the fighting to spread across thevast Chinese mainland.
Nowadays, many Japanese people are convinced that their country was deceived into goingto war by their own government and military. However, this belief has no basis in fact.
Japan never had any territorial ambitions on China, nor any motivation to seize China's
resources.
Professor Herbert Passin, who served as Chairman of the Department of Sociology at
Columbia University, was one of my few close American friends.
Passin graduated from the US Army Japanese Language School during World War II.
When he came to Japan after the end of the war as a member of the occupation army, he
was amazed by the high level of education of the Japanese people.
According to his book, Encounter with Japan, Second Lieutenant Passin asked a farmer for
directions while traveling through the Kyushu countryside, and chatted with him for awhile.
The farmer asked him, "How do you like Dazaifu?", and then he recited a poem.
"Splendid is the moon,and crystalline sounds the river's purl.
Come, let us all revel,
we who go to the capitaland we who stay behind."
Passin wrote that, "I was startled to learn that it was not just some local Chamber ofCommerce plug for the old hometown but from the Manyoshu, the great eighth-century
compilation of poetry... Later on, when I was doing studies in preparation for the
Occupation's land reform program, I often had occasion to remember that incident when I
would run into still another example of the very high cultural level that one encounters inJapanese villages."
The Battle of Okinawa began on April 1 when the US Army landed on the island.
During the battle, the Japanese Navy sent 1,005 planes and the Japanese Army sent 886
planes on kamikaze missions. 1,986 members of the Navy and 1,201 members of the Army
were killed during these missions.
On the ground, over 89,000 Japanese soldiers were killed in action on Okinawa. On theAmerican side, the US Army and Marine Corps together lost 7,374 men in battle. The US
Navy lost 5,000 servicemen, most of whom were killed in kamikaze attacks.

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Among the US Navy's losses were three destroyers sunk by kamikaze planes. A great
number of large ships, including battleships and aircraft carriers, were also hit by kamikaze
and sustained severe damage.
Racial equality: Japan's gift to the world
After the demise of the shogunate in the mid-nineteenth century, Japan strived to modernize
based on the models provided by the white men of Western nations. However, Japan at thesame time continued to hold a deep-seated fear of the West, as hard as that is to imagine
nowadays.
Most of the world was under white domination until the outbreak of World War II in the
Pacific when Japan finally broke the back of Western hegemony. In a short period of time,
Japan ousted the Western colonial powers, from the British in Hong Kong, which was
known as the "Pearl of the Orient", to the Dutch in Indonesia.
Until the Japanese Army marched into Southeast Asia and occupied this vast territory, theWestern powers ruled the world and white superiority over colored men was accepted as
the natural order of things.
Today, as a result of Japan fighting in World War II, the peoples of Asia and Africa, andeven the African-American community of the United States, have achieved equality withwhite people.
The souls of the kamikaze pilots can rest in peace knowing that they did not die in vain.
Rather, their sacrifice completely overturned the historical dominance of white people andcreated a new world based on the equality of the races.
We have advanced beyond the stage where a person's value is determined by the color of
their skin. This stands in the annals of world history as a monumental Japanese
accomplishment.
At the end of the long history of the human race, we have now for the first time achieved aworld where racial equality is the accepted norm. This was the realization of the great
dream nourished by the Japanese people ever since their country was forced out of its
isolationism by the Western powers.
Worldwide praise for the kamikaze
On July 9, after the conclusion of the Battle of Okinawa, the Swiss newspaper Tribune deGenève published the following editorial:"The systematic strategy referred to as 'kamikaze attacks' is a very costly one to employ, onboth human and material levels. However, the results of these assaults are far greater thannormal aerial strikes. On May 24, American ships in the vicinity of Okinawa came under83intense attack from Japanese kamikaze planes. As a result of this attack, the Japanese lost
111 kamikaze planes, but they sunk eleven American warships and transport vessels.
According to a message from the headquarters of Fleet Admiral Nimitz, the US Navy alone
suffered 5,000 killed in action during the Battle of Okinawa. The US Third Fleet sustained
losses so great that it had to be relieved by the Fifth Fleet. In war, conventional wisdom has
it that one protects his own life and tries to take the lives of the enemy. Sometimes, one cantry to inflict the maximum possible damage on the enemy by being ready to die oneself. In
their final moments, the kamikaze are barreling towards their targets at a speed of over
1,000 kilometers per hour and then die fiery deaths. Even if they are the enemy, one cannot
help but deeply admire the bravery of their acts."
Maurice Pinguet was a French philosopher. He was a professor at the University of Paris,and then, by invitation, at the University of Tokyo.
In his book, Voluntary Death in Japan, Pinguet praises the young Japanese pilots who
perished in kamikaze attacks:"Their sacrifice was all the more poignant for being devoid of pessimism and bitterness.
When they looked back on the brief time which had been allowed them, they were gratefulfor it... Pilot Officer Nagatsuka had the gentle, but now for ever unrealizable, ambition ofreading the whole of George Sand's The Master Bell Ringers. He thought of his mother andsisters, who must be protected from invasion. A good son, a good student, a good soldier,
the young pilot of the Special Units was martyr less to his faith than to his good will. He
was no daredevil and no boaster: he was serious, industrious... But what reaches us [about
the kamikaze pilots] is their sense, their calm, their lucidity. From the outside they looked
like raving madmen, or robots, those eager hearts too aware of the ills of their time to cling
to their own lives. No one could understand what they were doing, but for them it was
simple and spontaneous. People believed they were forced, inveigled, brainwashed, fed on
promises, illusions and drugs; people's eyes went through the crystal clarity of theirself-denial, so clear it was impossible to perceive. It is this purity which is so unbearably
moving. These young men, learning to die well at an age when life might have been so fair,
were misunderstood. It is for us to give them the tribute of admiration and compassion
which they deserve. They died for Japan, but we do not need to be Japanese to understandthem."
Voluntary Death in Japan was selected as one of the twenty best books of 1984 publishedin France. Pinguet found that the Japanese, which was used by the kamikaze pilots in their
final memoirs, wills, or poems addressed to their family members, was highly polished.
Though there are photos of many pilots heading towards their planes with cheerful smiles
on their faces, their thoughts were calm and clear.
There are a great many other non-Japanese who have written or spoken words of praise forthe kamikaze. I recommend that interested readers consult The Nobility of Failure: Tragic84Heroes in the History of Japan by Ivan Morris, a prominent British scholar of Japanese
literature.
My book Kamikaze: Japan's Suicide Gods was declared recommended reading by
Columbia University Professor Gerald Curtis, who is a good friend of mine, Admiral James
Lyons, former commander of the US Pacific Fleet, and Professor Edward Seidensticker,
famed for his translation of the Japanese classic novel The Tale of Genji.
The Great Tokyo Air Raid massacre
On March 10, a vast formation of B-29 bombers carried out an indiscriminate bombing raidagainst the Japanese capital of Tokyo. The raid centered around the low-lying Shitamachi
area, where a relentless rain of incendiary shells was dropped over its densely-packed
wooden residences. In one night, 100,000 citizens were killed. One quarter of the buildingsin Tokyo went up in flames, leaving more than one million people homeless.
The Great Tokyo Air Raid was intended to slaughter a huge number of civilians. The
number of victims was greater than that of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima andNagasaki.
Okinawa fell on June 23. From that moment on, every citizen was aware that mainland
Japan would be the next target.
In spite of this, the large majority of Japanese citizens never lost the will to go on fighting.
The reports of Japan's Home Ministry indicate that some people did express anger against
Japan's leaders in the military, government, and imperial family through their words oractions such as graffiti. However, this group constituted a very small segment of the
population.
If the Emperor had not put an end to the war on August 15, the decisive battle would likely
have been brought to mainland Japan and battles as brutal as the one which took place in
Okinawa would have occurred on the Japanese main islands of Honshu and Kyushu.
The people of Japan did not falter in the face of adversity. They kept themselves anxiously
busy from the time the war began.
Because of this, the suicide rate declined. Statistics on suicide rates began to be recorded in
the year 1882, and in the year 1893 the suicide rate was 17.2 people per every 100,000.
After that, there was little variation until the country was put under a more and more
stringent war footing as a result of the war in China. By the year 1940, the suicide rate had
dropped precipitously to 13.7, and continued to decline to 13.6 in 1941, 13.0 in 1942, and12.1 in 1943. In 1944, statistics could not be collected due to the start of the B-29 bombing
raids.

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In the year 2001, the suicide rate was 213.3, so it would appear that the spirit weakens
during a time of peace.
In preparation for the decisive battle on the mainland, the military and the newspapers werecalling for "one hundred million kamikaze".
Because the original goal of the war had been the preservation of the nation, it was not at
all anticipated that the use of kamikaze would be integrated into Japan's military strategy.
Even so, Japan struggled to keep on fighting.
Western and Japanese views on war
I have had the opportunity to re-learn the fact that Westerners and Japanese people holdradically divergent attitudes towards war.
Indeed, it is fair to say that the people of Japan alone have a unique philosophy on war.
Even the Chinese attitude towards war is based on practicality and self-interest.
Let's take the case of Professor Kenneth Galbraith, a well-known economist who was oneof the intellectuals with whom President John F. Kennedy surrounded himself. During the
Kennedy administration, he served as US ambassador to India.
After this, following his return to teaching at Harvard University, I once visited his home in
Boston. My American friend was close to Professor Galbraith and so I had undertaken, attheir request, to translate the professor's latest book into Japanese.
This was during the Johnson administration when the anti-Vietnam War movement,
centered around American young people, was at high tide.
Professor Galbraith insisted to me emphatically that, "The Vietnam War is immoral", so I
responded by asking him, "But did you not strongly support military intervention in
Vietnam at the time that you were President Kennedy’s advisor?"
Galbraith gave me a puzzled look, as if he didn't comprehend my question, and retorted, "Is
it not immoral to go on fighting a war which we have no chance of winning?"
At that moment, I was astonished to see how different this was from the Japanese attitude
towards war. The Japanese people value strength of spirit over practical realities.
I then bid farewell to Professor Galbraith, and while I was heading to the airport, I thought
to myself, "If Japan had won the war with America, we would certainly not have become
the submissive, pseudo-pacifist state specializing in making apologies that we are today."86Surely, I thought, this transformation occurred because the people felt that it was "immoral"
for us to have fought until the situation was hopeless and the war was lost.
The Japanese emphasis on spirit is completely distinct from the Western view of war.
Japan's indigenous haiku poems hit us close to our hearts due to their brevity. Western
paintings fill every corner of the canvass thickly with paint, whereas Japanese paintingsomit scenery.
Instead of looking at everything, we express, through our hearts, only the core spiritualessence.

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Chapter 8 - The United States and the Atomic Bombings of JapanThe unnecessary atomic bombings
An atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, and three days later another was
dropped on Nagasaki.
In his memoirs, Freedom Betrayed1, Roosevelt's predecessor as president, Herbert Hoover,strongly denounced the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
"Prior to the Potsdam Conference in July, 1945, the Japanese were repeatedly signaling forpeace. A review of these Japanese peace efforts sheds light on the actual situation at thisfateful conference... In March, 1945, a month after Yalta, the Swedish Minister to Japanwas requested by Japanese Foreign Minister Shigemitsu to enlist his government to mediatepeace for Japan. Nothing came from it and its only importance was the indication ofJapan’s determination to make peace... Thus before the ultimatum issued at the Potsdam
Conference on July 26th, there had been six months of peace feelers by the Japanese, andnearly two weeks before [the atomic bombings], the positive proposal of Japan to Russia of
which Truman, Byrnes and Stimson had full information from intercepted telegrams."2
At that time, James Byrnes was the Secretary of State and Henry Stimson was the Secretaryof War.
"The seventeenth wandering of American statesmanship was Truman’s immoral order todrop the atomic bomb on the Japanese. Not only had Japan been repeatedly suing for peace
but it was the act of unparalleled brutality in all American history. It will forever weighheavily on the American conscience."3
The men who dropped the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki were speciallytrained B-29 bomber crewmen of the United States Army Air Forces who took off from theairfield on the island of Tinian.
What if Japan had had an atomic bomb?
I once met with John McCloy, Assistant Secretary of War under Henry Stimson, and asked
him a question about the atomic bombings. McCloy was present at the White House
conference at which President Truman made the decision to drop the atomic bomb on
Hiroshima.

1

Freedom Betrayed – Herbert Hoover’s Secret History of the Second World War and its Aftermathedited with an Introduction by George H. Nash, Hoover Institution Press, Stanford, 2011.
2
Ibid., p.560 - 561
3
Ibid., p.882.

88The American woman who I most admired has sadly passed away, but she had lived in
New York. Mrs. Iphigene Sulzberger was the head of the Sulzberger family, which owns
The New York Times Company. She was a petite but sprightly woman, brimming withcuriosity. She was always delightfully animated.
When she learned that I was coming to the United States, she hosted a luncheon, called an"editorial luncheon", for me at the executive dining room of The New York Times Building
which faces Times Square. The "editorial luncheon" brought together the newspaper's top
editors for a question and answer session with guests. She also invited me and one of her
friends to dinner at her home in the New York town of Stanford.
Once when I had travelled to New York, she had invited my wife and me to a banquet ather mansion on the upper reaches of the Hudson River, which flows to the shores ofManhattan.
At the dinner, the great New York Times reporter James Reston and Mrs. Iphigene’s oldfriend John McCloy, who had been Assistant Secretary of War during the final year ofWorld War II, were also invitees.
I was aware that McCloy was a participant in the conference where the decision to drop theatomic bombs had been made.
I brought up the issue of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and I asked him,
"If Japan was in possession of even a single atomic bomb at that time, and had the capacity
to drop it anywhere in America, would the United States still have subjected Japan to anuclear attack?"
Reston was surprised by my question and immediately interjected, "Why would you ask
something so obvious? You should know the answer without having to ask."
I responded, "It's something I wanted to confirm, because this is the first time I have met
one of the men who participated in the decision to drop the atomic bombs."
Then McCloy said, "Naturally, you too know the answer. If Japan also had had an atomic
bomb, then making a nuclear attack on Japan would have been unthinkable."
The cenotaph in Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park bears the inscription, "Let all the souls
here rest in peace, for we shall not repeat this mistake." However, the real pledge we shouldmake is to not repeat the mistake of inviting upon ourselves another terrible nuclear attackby not having nuclear weapons of our own.
The final reunion of the unit that dropped the A-bomb

89

In August 1990, in the town of Wendover, which straddles the border between Utah andNevada, the veterans of the United States Army Air Forces' 509th Composite Group, which
had dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, held their final reunion.
The town of Wendover is half in Utah and half in Nevada, and it is surrounded on all foursides by a vast desert. During the closing years of World War II, it was just a small village,
more than two hundred kilometers distance from the next nearest town.
That is the reason why Wendover was made the site of a top secret air base in 1944. Here,the unit which carried out the atomic bombings was formed and trained under the utmost
secrecy.
The old flight crews of the 509th Composite Group brought their family members to thereunion, and soon Wendover's hotel was filled with over 500 people from across the UnitedStates.
I also was invited to the reunion to deliver a commemorative speech.
On the day before my speech, some veterans of the 509th Composite Group guided mearound the old air field, which was located not far from the hotel where the reunion was
taking place.
The hanger which once held the Enola Gay, the bomber piloted by Colonel Paul Tibbets
that dropped the atomic bomb, remained intact just the way it had looked at the time.
However, it was now a quiet airport for civilian use only. There were a couple of small
Cessna aircraft parked there.
I saw no signs posted anywhere to explain that once, forty-five years earlier, this had been
the site of the secret air base where the unit which dropped the atomic bombs was stationed.
Any person who dropped by without knowing that already probably thought of the site as
nothing more than a lonely, largely abandoned airport.
The veterans brought their wives and children to the airport and the old hanger. Some ofthem were holding cans of beer in their hands. There were forty or fifty people there in total,and I shook hands and spoke with seven or eight of them. Some of them were salesman ofJapanese-made cars or cameras.
I gave my speech the next day in the hotel's auditorium. I was scheduled to speak for forty
minutes.
Retired Brigadier General Tibbets had been introduced prior to my speech. He was wearinga suit and was sitting in the front row.

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In my speech, I described how Japan had been making peace offers since June of 1945 andwas requesting that Sweden and the Soviet Union mediate. Because Washington was fully
aware that Japan was trying to negotiate its surrender, I argued, Japan would havesurrendered even without the atomic bombings and thus there was never any need to drop
the bombs.
The explanation I gave of the peace maneuvers of the Japanese government and military
was virtually identical to what Herbert Hoover had written about the atomic bombings in
his memoirs as I quoted at the top of this chapter.
And yet, Hoover's memoirs were only released in 2011, twelve years after my speech. The
memoirs, which were published by the Hoover Institution, are a huge tome, 957 pages inlength.
As I was writing the rough draft of my speech, I considered mentioning what General of the
Army Dwight Eisenhower, who would become the 34th President of the United States, had
said to Secretary of War Stimson upon being informed that an atomic bomb would be
dropped on Hiroshima. He recalled that, "my belief [was] that Japan was already defeated
and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary... our country should avoid
shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, nolonger mandatory". I decided that because the horrific nature of the atomic bombing wasevident, there was no need to quote an American to make the point.
At the time he said that, Eisenhower was Supreme Allied Commander in the European
theater.
I concluded the speech by saying that, while the atomic bombings of Hiroshima andNagasaki were atrocious acts contrary to both international law and basic humanity, they
took place in the madness of war, and for that reason, Japanese people have alreadyforgiven it and bear no resentment against the United States.
I was only a little over five minutes into my speech when, one by one, around 100 or 150
people rose from their seats with their family members and walked out in protest. They
gathered in the hallway and began to sing patriotic songs.
Did the atomic bombing save Japanese lives?
By the time I had finished speaking, the room was filled with empty seats. Only forty or so
people remained.
Brigadier General Tibbets was among those who stayed behind. After I had left the stage
and Tibbets had exited into the hallway, I was moved to see a group of more than thirty
people line up to shake my hand. They thanked me personally and told me things like,"That was a good speech" and "I truly understand the Japanese viewpoint." As I spoke to91

them, the chorus of patriotic songs being sung in the hallway continued to filter into theroom.
Throughout their lives, the former members of the 509th Composite Group had taken great
pride in what they had done during the war, convinced that the atomic bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki had forced the Japanese to surrender and thus prevented aninvasion of mainland Japan which would have cost millions of American and Japanese
lives.
The precise reason why they invited me as a speaker was because they had believed that I
would tell them how Japan had been saved thanks to the atomic bombings.
One of the veterans who stayed in his seat right up to the end of my speech told me, "If
General Tibbets had walked out, everyone else would have followed him, and you would
have been the only one left in the room."
Paul Tibbets was a small, quiet man who did not look to be in good health.
The day before, one of the veterans had confessed to me that, "After the war, Brigadier
General Tibbets was not lucky as a soldier. He had bombed Hiroshima, but the Army didn't
think of it as a major accomplishment and so was not able to promote him to the rank ofmajor general. I feel truly sorry for him."
I returned back to my room. I had been invited as a guest to the reunion dinner which was
taking place that evening in the hotel. However, I was told before the dinner that, "Some ofthe vets got drunk and were threatening to beat you to death. We apologize, but we would
like you to stay in your room tonight and take room service."
The next morning, local papers reported on the gist of my speech. All the veterans joined
the unveiling ceremony for a monument that had been built in Wendover's main
thoroughfare, but I did not attend.
I had some free time, so I went to see the salt flats, which are located about ten kilometers
outside the town.
The salt flats are an area where hard salt covers the whole area of the earth. Because theground is perfectly level, the salt flats are famous as the place where automobile land speed
world records are set.
As far as the eye could see, it was a vast expanse of pure white salt, which sparkled underthe blazing desert sun. On that day too, there were dozens of racing cars of all colors parked
in the pit.

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Among them were three Nissan sports cars from Japan, which were being worked on by agroup of ten or so young Japanese men and women. They told me that they had cometogether from Tokyo. Just a little while ago, they said, one of their cars had reached 277
miles per hour (446 kilometers per hour).
I chatted with several of them. When I commented that, "Forty-five years ago, that airport
just over there was the place where the unit which dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki was trained." They were surprised and told me, "Did that really happen?"
I thought to myself, "World War II has really become ancient history to them."
Two of the former members of the 509th Composite Group saw me off at the airport thatevening. Just before that, several Japanese newspaper correspondents who had come tocover the reunion interviewed me. One of them praised me for "saying what we Japanesepeople needed to say".
The different treatment of Germans and Japanese
It was strong racial contempt of the Japanese people which motivated the United States todrop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even though Japan had expressed its desire
for peace.
Hatred of the Japanese people ran high at the time, derived from the earlier prejudices ofwhite people against Asians and Africans.
In December 1944, eight months before the atomic bombings, an opinion poll conducted in
the United States found that 13% of Americans answered affirmatively to the pre-prepared
question, "Should all Japanese people be killed?" I was astonished that such a question had
even been asked.
An opinion poll was also conducted concerning Germany, but it did not include thequestion, "Should all German people be killed?"
Most of the propaganda posters which were ubiquitous in wartime America depicted
Japanese soldiers not simply as ugly humans, but as apes.
They showed gibbons, orangutans, or gorillas wearing the uniforms of the Japanese Army.
Japanese soldiers also appeared on the posters as insects or reptiles.
Though American soldiers collected the ears and skulls of Japanese soldiers as souvenirs
and turned their bones into letter openers, no incidents of this nature ever took place against
German soldiers in the European theater.

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In the Pacific theater, most American units never took any prisoners. There are countlesseyewitness accounts of American, British, and Australian forces shooting Japanese soldiers
who were trying to surrender.
Many Allied officers and men hoped to have the Japanese people wiped out.
Admiral William Halsey, who led a carrier group throughout the war, was a white
supremacist who openly advocated, "the almost total elimination of the Japanese as a race."
Halsey is also known for leading the Doolittle Raid, a surprise attack on mainland Japanesetargets, including Tokyo, carried out by B-25 bombers early in the war in April of 1942.
MIT professor John Dower’s book, introduced in Chapter 5, meticulously documents thefact that many units took pride in their policy to take no Japanese prisoners. According to
Dower, an article published in an army newspaper about the 41st Infantry Division, which
had been transferred to the Pacific Theater, unabashedly declared that "The 41st Didn’t
Take Prisoners."
Chapter One of America's official history of the Pacific Theater mentions that over ninety
per cent of the Japanese soldiers engaged in America's island hopping campaign werereported as killed in action. This figure may have included Japanese soldiers massacred by
the Americans, though there is no way to definitively confirm this.
US Army records state that most of the Japanese soldiers who became POWs were injured.
Nonetheless, the US Army killed most of the wounded Japanese soldiers who had been
captured.
In wartime Japan too, the government stoked hatred of the enemy, who were called the"Anglo-American beasts," but despite this, there were absolutely no cases of Japanesesoldiers indiscriminately massacring British or American soldiers who were surrendering.
It would seem the Japanese had good reason to call American soldiers "beasts". Throughout
their history, the Japanese people have always made racial equality their guiding principle.
The world was in the grip of a shocking racism directed at colored peoples, until after theend of the war when the world was reconstructed on the basis of racial equality.
The Potsdam Declaration and the myth of unconditional surrender
On July 26, 1945, President Truman, Prime Minister Churchill, and General Secretary
Stalin held talks in the city of Potsdam, located in the suburbs of Berlin, where they
unveiled the Potsdam Declaration. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek had not been invited,but his name was added to the declaration.
At that point in time, the Soviet Union was still bound by the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality
Pact signed in April 1941, so it did not sign the declaration. The Soviet Union only joined94

in on the Potsdam Declaration on August 8, at the same time that it declared war on Japan,
in violation of the pact.
Under President Roosevelt, the United States demanded that Japan and Germany surrenderunconditionally. In November 1943, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Chiang met in Cairo, Egypt,where they announced the Cairo Declaration. According to the Cairo Declaration, "TheThree Great Allies are fighting this war to restrain and punish the aggression of Japan," and"will continue to persevere in the serious and prolonged operations necessary to procure theunconditional surrender of Japan."
In May 1945, Germany surrendered unconditionally to the Allies.
By contrast, the Potsdam Declaration indicated that Japan could surrender with conditions.
In reality, the Potsdam Declaration only demanded "the unconditional surrender of all
Japanese armed forces," and not the unconditional surrender of the Japanese nation or theEmperor.
President Roosevelt died suddenly on April 12, and Vice President Truman succeeded him
as the thirty-third President of the United States.
Why did America's strategy towards Japan change so dramatically in such a short period oftime?
On July 24, President Truman handed down a top secret order to implement the invasion of
Kyushu, codenamed Operation Olympic, in November. The order was received by Generalof the Army Douglas MacArthur, Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, and General Henry Arnold,
the respective commanders of the US Army, Navy, and Air Forces in the Pacific Theater.
Twenty-two days earlier on July 2, War Secretary Stimson submitted his "Proposed
Program for Japan" to the President. Stimson's program predicted that the invasion of
mainland Japan would require five million soldiers, of whom more than one million might
become casualties, and therefore recommended that the United States seek only
unconditional surrender of the Japanese military, instead of their previous demand for
unconditional surrender of the Japanese government.
The Japanese Army that America feared
In 2006, all the top secret planning documents on the invasion of mainland Japan, whichwere approved in Washington in the waning months of the war, were declassified.
America's plan for the conquest of mainland Japan, codenamed Operation Downfall, wascomprised of two parts, firstly an attack on the southern island of Kyushu, and thenlandings on the Kanto Plain, the heart of Japan.

95Each page of the document, divided into one part on the amphibious invasion of Kyushu
and one part on the amphibious invasion of Kanto on Japan's largest island of Honshu, isstamped as "TOP SECRET".
According to the plan, the invasion of Kyushu, codenamed Operation Olympic, would havetaken place on November 1. Early that morning, fourteen divisions of US Army soldiersand US Marines were to storm the beaches at Miyazaki, Kagoshima, and Ariake Bay. They
were to be boarded on 3,000 ships including sixty-six aircraft carriers of the Fifth Fleet tocover their landing. On November 4, there would be another landing in the vicinity of
Kaimondake on the southern tip of Kyushu.
Prior to this, on October 27, the United States had planned to occupy the small islands
around Kyushu and there set up a radar base, a seaplane base, and other infrastructure.
As a means of boosting the morale of America's fighting men, all the landing targets on the
shore around Miyazaki were named after America's most beloved passenger cars such as
Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, Chrysler, and Ford.
Several British Far East Fleet ships were also scheduled to participate in the attack, and so,
as a gesture to them, one landing site was named Austin for the automobiles produced by
Britain's Austin Motor Company.
The declassified documents foresaw that 250,000 Americans soldiers would be killedduring the invasion of Kyushu alone.
The invasion of the Kanto Plain, codenamed Operation Coronet, would require double thetroop strength of Operation Olympic. Twenty-eight divisions were scheduled to land in
Sagami Bay on March 1, 1946.
The United States had planned to commit a force of more than 4,000 ships, from the Fifth
Fleet on down, to its attack on the Kanto Plain.
Because dogged resistance from Japanese soldiers and civilians was foreseen, the UnitedStates had expected to suffer a massive number of casualties.
Major General Charles Willoughby, who was Chief of Intelligence to General MacArthur,is on record as believing that the Japanese would continue resisting until the end of the year
1946 and that at least one million American soldiers would be killed or wounded incombat.
What Washington feared the most was that the invasion of mainland Japan would be too
costly in terms of soldiers’ lives for public opinion at home to bear.

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One of the top secret documents states that, "We have been capturing the islands of the
Pacific up to Iwo Jima through our leapfrogging strategy, but in every case we have put
ashore a number of troops over 2.5 times greater than the number of Japanese defenders.
However, if we must assault the Japanese mainland, Japanese forces will be two times more
numerous than our own army, and if we include civilians, the ratio becomes even greater.
There is no race which fights as fanatically as the Japanese, whose soldiers act like they arepossessed by the devil."
It was believed that even if America committed all the strength it could muster, it would
still take until 1947 to force Japan to surrender.
According to the documents, the US Army would also be forced to suffer casualties fromrelentless air, land, and sea-based suicide attacks by Japanese soldiers and civilians.
At the time of the occupation of Japan, an American investigation found that on the day
Japan had surrendered the Japanese Army and Navy put together still had 12,725 bombers,
fighters, and reconnaissance planes hidden in reserve inside their fortified bunkers.
The kamikaze did not die in vain
Some believe that, if the United States had continued to insist that Japan surrenderunconditionally, then the Japanese people would not have ceased resisting even after theatomic bombings.
In order to compel Japan to make peace, the United States government had decided to offer
Japan a "conditional surrender", in which the Emperor system would be preserved, basedon the suggestions of Joseph Grew, former ambassador to Japan who was then Under
Secretary of State.
Thus, the Potsdam Declaration demanded unconditional surrender only of the Japanese
armed forces while providing a list of surrender conditions to the Japanese government.
The Potsdam Declaration clearly stated "Following are our terms," and then requested
Japan's conditional surrender.
Between August 9 and 14, Emperor Hirohito resolved to impose an unprecedented "sacreddecision," and by doing so ended a war which had lasted three years and eight months.
If the United States had continued to demand unconditional surrender, it is not likely that
this "sacred decision" would ever have been laid down. In that case, Japan would havefought to the last and probably even the Emperor system would not have survived.
Without the Emperor, Japan too would have ceased to exist.

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Nowadays, it's common to hear Japanese people say that the kamikaze pilots, "died for alost cause," but in reality the kamikaze were Japan's saviours. Still, it was not only the
kamikaze who did their duty to the nation.
I firmly believe that we must also show our profound gratitude to all the soldiers who, justlike the kamikaze, perished in battle throughout the northern and southern islands of the
Pacific Ocean.
In spite of everything, Japan's soldiers fought magnificently. It was the most powerful army
the world had ever seen.
Japan's love of military songs
The Japanese people adore military songs. There is no other country in the world where
military songs are so widely heard in day-to-day life. In every other country, military songs
are known only to those people with experience in their nation's armed forces.
In Japan, young people sing military songs as well. Even the left-wing newspaper Asahi
Shimbun has run full-page advertisements for CD-ROM collections of military songs.
What is the reason for Japan's unique love of military songs? This is not a phenomenon
seen anywhere in the Americas, Europe, or Asia.
Moreover, all of Japan's military songs have gloomy lyrics and sorrowful melodies.
The lyrics of Danchone Melody go, "Shells fly through the air, The mast will break... If I
should die I will gather the demons, from the shores of the River Styx, and wrestle withthem." The lyrics of Father, You Were Strong go, "You slept among enemy corpses, drank
muddy water, and ate grass... You were immersed for three days, in a creek up to your neck,though you had not eaten anything for three days." The song Bivouac Ballad includes thelines, "My father appeared in a dream, and said to me 'Come back home after you havedied!'"
One must admit that these lyrics are rather grim. If any other country had its soldiers singthese songs, morale would plummet and soldiers would be scrambling in order to be thefirst to flee the battlefield.
Japan's Army Ministry and Navy Ministry commissioned outside composers andsongwriters to create most of their military songs, and then authorized them for use. In spiteof everything, Japanese soldiers fought valiantly while singing these very songs.
This proves just how desperately and stoically all the people of Japan were fighting in
response to the unjust persecution they were suffering at the hands of the Western powers.

98Neither before nor during the war did the Japanese authorities need to force the people andfighting men to sing these songs.
Right up to the present day, the Japanese people have never been able to forget the spiritthat led them to fight again and again to defend their country since the birth of modern
Japan following the 1868 Meiji Restoration. This history is a tragic tale just like those inJapan's military songs.
Japan is the world's only country where collections of military songs are widely sold. In
foreign countries, a newspaper with a high circulation would never run an ad for acollection of military songs.
The United States banned military songs and patriotic songs during the postwar occupationof Japan, and since then Japanese TV and radio stations have entirely refrained from airingthem. Even so, these songs continue to be the favorites of the Japanese people as a whole,including even the youth.
We take pride, from the very bottom of our hearts, that we have fought bravely against all
obstacles since the time of the Meiji Restoration.
On September 2, the surrender ceremony took place in Tokyo Bay aboard the battleship
USS Missouri. The Instrument of Surrender was the equivalent of an international treaty
signed between the victorious and the vanquished nations.

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Chapter 9 - A Nation with a Fabricated History
SCAP's battle for history
In September 1945, the US Army occupied Japan.
During the occupation, the United States implemented the War Guilt Information Program,a plan to thoroughly indoctrinate the Japanese people to believe that Japan was a sinful
nation which had to atone for starting the war.
On October 2, 1945, General MacArthur, known as the Supreme Commander for the AlliedPowers (SCAP), issued General Orders No. 4 which read, "Make clear to all levels of theJapanese public the true facts of their defeat, their war guilt, the responsibility of themilitarists for present and future Japanese suffering and privation, and the reasons for andobjectives of the military occupation by the Allied Powers." This was a mere one monthfrom the signing of the Instrument of Surrender aboard the USS Missouri.
Instilling a sense of guilt in the minds of the Japanese people and robbing them of their
spirit of independence were indeed the two most important goals of the US occupation.
Right from the outset of the occupation in September, SCAP decreed a stringent Press Code,placing restrictions on the media.
The Press Code was a major violation with respect to the Potsdam Declaration, which
stipulated that, "Freedom of speech, of religion, and of thought, as well as respect for thefundamental human rights shall be established." Instead, the Japanese people were to be
robbed of their normal capacity to think as citizens of an independent nation.
Everything, from publishers such as newspapers to even the private letters of ordinary
citizens, was subject to strict regulation and censorship. Then, from December, the Japan
Broadcasting Corporation began airing "This Is The Truth," later renamed "Truth Box," andnewspapers nationwide began publishing the series "The History of the Pacific War". The
plan was to make all the people of Japan believe that their country was an evil nation.
After having conquered Japan militarily, SCAP waged a full-scale battle for history withthe aim of depriving the Japanese people of their history. By robbing them of their own
memories of the past, SCAP intended to break the Japanese people's spirit and to remodel
Japan as a vassal state, to be subservient to the United States long after the end of theoccupation.
On September 11, in preparation for the Tokyo War Crimes Trial where Japan's leaders
were to be judged, SCAP began arresting thirty-nine "war crimes suspects" who had
worked in influential positions in wartime Japan, including General Tojo Hideki.

100Then, a variety of measures intended to break Japan's spirit were implemented in quick
succession, including the Shinto Directive, which abolished State Shinto, a purge of prewar
officials, and the imposition of a new constitution.
The Shinto Directive was inspired by the belief of the occupation army that Shinto was abarbaric, primitive faith which worshiped mountains, trees, and animals.
Today, the principle of separation of religion and state is brought up constantly, but if Japan
had been a Christian nation like the Philippines, no attempt would have been made toimpose that separation.
Today, Japan is the only country in the world, excluding communist China and North
Korea and Confucian nations like South Korea, whose national and local government
ceremonies are strictly non-religious.
In other democracies, like the United States, Great Britain, and France, official events are
Christian-based. Should the state really be promoting atheism?
Calling for a retrial of the IMTFEThe International Military Tribunal for the Far East, known as the Tokyo War Crimes Trial,
was the central mechanism through which a war guilt complex was implanted in theJapanese mind.
Before World War II, there was no precedent for a nation's leaders to be tried for war
crimes due to their decision to go to war. Even within international law, no provision forthis existed.
Moreover, the Tokyo War Crimes Trial was a clear violation of the Potsdam Declaration.
The declaration did state that "stern justice shall be meted out to all war criminals,
including those who have visited cruelties upon our prisoners," but this referred only to
attacks on non-combatants and mistreatment of POWs.
At the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, the defendants were tried for "crimes against peace" and"crimes against humanity," but before the opening of the trial these concepts did not evenexist.
The Tokyo War Crimes Trial was simply fraudulent—not at all worthy of being called a"trial".
Japan was on trial for the crime of having invaded Asia, and yet even during this show trial,
Great Britain, the Netherlands, and France were fighting wars of aggression to reassert theircolonial rule over the Malay Peninsula, Indonesia, and Vietnam. That alone is a major
indictment of the trial's hypocrisy.

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The Tokyo War Crimes Trial one-sidedly investigated only the crimes Japan was accusedof, while at the same time allowing no mention of any war crimes committed by the Allies.
However, it was the United States that had dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima andNagasaki and massacred over 100,000 people in a single night during the Great Tokyo Air
Raid. Even just looking at the killing and wounding of civilians and noncombatants inviolation of international law alone, the United States was guilty of serious war crimes.
Major General Charles Willoughby, who was an advisor to MacArthur and one of the twomost powerful men in SCAP, once told Judge Bert Roling that the Tokyo War Crimes Trial"was the worst hypocrisy in recorded history." He also told Roling that "since this kind oftrial took place, he would forbid his son to enter military service."
During the trial, William Webb, the Australian justice who served as President of the
Tribunal, wrote to his wife Beatrice back home that, "I've become fed up with standing
before such a tribunal as this."
The man who had started the war was President Franklin Roosevelt. Though he had diedsuddenly in April 1945, Roosevelt was the man who truly deserved to be put on trial for"crimes against peace".
The Indian justice Radhabinod Pal concluded in his dissenting judgment that "a trial whichis carried out on this basis of law is nothing more than a pretense to make it look as if
proper legal procedures have been taken, in order to satisfy one's desire of revenge."
Heramba Lal Gupta, one of the leaders of the Indian Independence Movement, gave thefollowing speech in 1946:"I think that the International Military Tribunal for the Far East will surely be re-evaluatedby the nations of Asia by the time we enter the twenty-first century, and then, a second
Tokyo Trial will be held where Asia and all the world will regain its good sense and will
judge all deeds in a fair, equal, and truthful manner. At that time, all the war heroes of theUnited States and of the great powers of Europe, who have been committing acts ofaggression against Asia for many years, will receive stern punishments. Conversely, theJapanese who were accused of serious crimes by the IMTFE, especially the seven killed as
Class A war criminals, will be rehabilitated, and the day may come when they shall beworshipped like gods as the saviors of Asia. That is what should rightfully happen."
Henry S. Stokes, who I introduced in a previous chapter, has lived in Japan for forty years
and has served as Tokyo bureau chief to The New York Times and other newspapers. In his
book, "Breaking the Victors' History Spell Cast by the Allied Powers: Wake Up, Japan!",which was published in Japanese by Nisshin Hodo, Stokes declared that, "What we ought
to do is ask the United Nations for a retrial of the IMTFE."

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America's corruption of history
In February 2015, I was invited to the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan in Yurakucho,
Tokyo, for a joint press conference with Mizushima Satoru, president of Channel Sakura.
In January, Mr. Mizushima played a key role in founding the Citizens' Council to
Investigate the Asahi Shimbun, which had launched a class action lawsuit seeking remedial
damages and a published apology from the Asahi Shimbun for the significant harm that thisnewspaper had done to Japan's international reputation through its fabricated news stories
about the comfort women.
At that time, more than 23,000 people from across the country participated in the lawsuit asplaintiffs.
I had been asked to attend the press conference by Mr. Mizushima as one of the plaintiffs.
My first statement at the press conference was:
"I would like to raise an objection to the information card which was sent out to themembers of the correspondents' club on the occasion of today's press conference. It says,'Mainstream historians acknowledge the historical fact that the Japanese Army forced the
comfort women to work in brothel facilities during the 1930s and 1940s.' In the articles
which I have contributed to American newspapers like The New York Times and the WallStreet Journal, I was introduced as being a historian. I consider my views to be mainstream,
and thus find this description to be greatly in error."I also added that, "In the same card, I am introduced as being 'a representative of therevisionist view'. However, the 'revisionist view' was the history which was forced on Japan
during the US occupation, and which continues to exert influence to this day. I do notconsider myself to be a revisionist."
It was the United States that distorted Japan's true history.
During the question and answer phase, an American reporter stood up and asked me, "Evenif you say that, do you understand that the international community believes that the
comfort women were sex slaves?"
Because I was angered by his tone, I immediately upbraided him. "Throughout Japan's long
history, no system of slavery has ever existed. I don't want to be asked such a question by acitizen of a country like the United States, which still practiced slavery in the second half ofthe nineteenth century." Several Japanese reporters applauded me.
The United States only emancipated its slaves in 1863, five years before Japan's Meiji
Restoration. I added that, "Japan has never witnessed either huge massacres of whole cities103

or religious wars characterized by indiscriminate killing, like those between Catholics andProtestants, at any time in its history. Please do a little more research on this subject."
The peoples' movement to free the war criminals
The San Francisco Peace Treaty came into effect in 1952.
The year after Japan regained its independence, Japan's National Diet amended law books
to designate as “war dead” all the so-called "war criminals" who died in prison, committed
suicide, or were executed as a result of the unjust military tribunals of the victor powers. By
doing this, their surviving family members were made eligible for a pension. The Diet also
unanimously approved a resolution calling for the speedy release of those individuals still
serving prison sentences for war crimes.
This Diet resolution grew out of a nationwide mass petition movement which began
directly after Japan regained its independence under the leadership of groups like the Japan
Federation of Bar Associations. They drafted a "Plea for Clemency, Commutation, andRepatriation for the Imprisoned War Criminals", which received the signatures of forty
million people.
Forty million people was nearly sixty percent of Japan's population at that time, andvirtually all of its adult population. The petition represented the wishes of theoverwhelming majority of the people.
Today, the title of "Class A war criminal" is considered a badge of shame, but that was not
at all the case in the immediate aftermath of the restoration of Japanese independence.
Shigemitsu Mamoru and Kaya Okinori, who were imprisoned as Class A war criminals,
both served as cabinet ministers after the end of the US occupation. Shigemitsu was foreign
minister in the cabinet of Prime Minister Hatoyama Ichiro, and Kaya was Justice Ministerin the cabinet of Prime Minister Ikeda Hayato.
Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke was arrested as a Class A war crimes suspect and was heldin Sugamo Prison.
Indeed, Ogata Taketora and Shimomura Kainan, the chief editors of the Asahi Shimbun,
and Shoriki Matsutaro, the owner of the Yomiuri Shimbun, were also arrested as Class A
war crimes suspects, though perhaps out of embarrassment, the Yomiuri and Asahi Shimbun
today refuse to mention this fact.
In 1956, when Japan gained admittance to the United Nations under Foreign Minister
Shigemitsu Mamoru, Shigemitsu was greeted with a thunderous applause when he appeared
before the UN General Assembly. The fact that he had been a Class A war criminal wasnever made into an issue.

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As Japan's experience of war grew more distant, Japan gradually lost its senses. We must
not allow the memory of the war to fade away.
Masochistic history and its irresponsible Japanese preachers
The War Guilt Information Program sowed the seeds of a masochistic view of history, but
it was disseminated through the work of irresponsible Japanese citizens.
After Japan regained its independence, Emperor Hirohito made numerous official visits to
Yasukuni Shrine, and Japanese prime ministers between Yoshida Shigeru and Nakasone
Yasuhiro also openly visited the shrine.
During that period, neither China nor South Korea ever voiced a single word of protest overthe visits of Japanese prime ministers to Yasukuni. However, it was only after Prime
Minister Nakasone stopped visiting Yasukuni at the request of the General Secretary of theChinese Communist Party, Hu Yaobang, that China came to be harshly critical of all visits
to the shrine by Japanese prime ministers.
Likewise, if Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi had never condemned Japan's "colonial
rule and aggression," and if Chief Cabinet Secretary Kono Yohei had never apologized forthe "coercive" recruitment of girls as comfort women, then China, South Korea, and theUnited States would never have been able to pressure Japan to continue to adhere to the
Murayama and Kono Statements.
Is patriotism a sin?
Soon after, the word "patriotism" itself became taboo in Japan.
Though patriotism does not fall into Buddhism's sinful karma or as one of the seven deadly
sins of Christianity, Japan's mass media and intelligentsia blame patriotism for causing
World War II.
This is the reason why the parades held on Indonesia's Independence Day are neverbroadcast on Japanese television, even though the men waving the Indonesian flag are
dressed in the uniforms of PETA and carry Japanese swords, and even though the female
chorus sings the Japanese song "The Patriotic March".
In November 1991, America's ABC News reported that, "Signed documents from July
1941 have been discovered, showing that President Roosevelt approved a military plan tolaunch surprise bombing raids on the Japanese cities of Tokyo, Yokohama, Kyoto, Kobe,
and Osaka in October of that year using over one hundred American bombers disguised as
Chinese aircraft." One would think that this would be critically important news forJapanese citizens to know.
In spite of this, the Japan Broadcasting Corporation's news program never bothered toreport on what, by any reasonable standard, should have been a big story.

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One would also think that Japan's media would have given broad coverage to the 2013
publication of Herbert Hoover's memoirs, in which Hoover and General MacArthur concurat a private meeting that Hoover's successor as president, Franklin Roosevelt, was a"madman" who had willfully provoked Japan into war. And yet, nothing like that happened.
The year 2015 marked the 120th anniversary of Japan's victory in the First Sino-Japanese
War and the 110th anniversary of Japan's victory in the Russo-Japanese War. These wars
were two of Japan's greatest trials as a nation-state. If the Japanese had not won either ofthese conflicts, Japan as we know it today would not exist.
Victory was achieved only because Japan's citizenry united as one to face the crisis andbecause its soldiers fought with conspicuous valor and courage.
Japan's media should have honored and celebrated the anniversaries of these two historic
victories, but instead they were simply ignored.
In 2014, the newspaper Asahi Shimbun responded to the ruling party's attempts to broaden
Japan's right to collective self-defense with a banner headline reading, "WE MUST NOT
BECOME A COUNTRY THAT CAN GO TO WAR." However, at the time of the First
Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War, Japan managed to keep its independence
only because it was a country that could go to war.
World War II ended seventy years ago, and yet, Japanese newspapers and TV networks arestill under the spell of the war guilt complex created by the US occupation army's War
Guilt Information Program to break Japan's spirit.
The spirit of an independent nation
In October 1944, Flight Officer Nagamine Hajime wrote a farewell poem which read,"Even if I am to die here in the South Seas, I will be thinking about the springs of the years
still to come." Then he flew out of Mabalacat Airfield in Luzon, the Philippines, as part of
the first group of kamikaze pilots. He was only nineteen years of age.
In January the following year, Sublieutenant Fukuyama Masamichi composed a poem
which read, "I don't fear losing the life I have devoted to you. I worry only about the fate of
the nation." Like Nagamine, he embarked from Mabalacat Airfield as part of the 18th
Kongo Unit of kamikaze fliers. He was only twenty-one years of age.
Since that nineteen-year-old hero dreamed of "the springs of the years still to come,”
seventy springs have passed by.
Would any of us be able to meet face-to-face with the spirits of those who sacrificed
themselves to protect Japan in World War II without shirking in shame?

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In 1952, the San Francisco Peace Treaty came into effect, restoring independence to Japan.
The San Francisco Peace Conference had convened the previous year, bringing together
representatives of forty-eight countries including Japan.
According to Article 11 of the peace agreement, Japan was obligated to accept the
judgments of the Allied war crimes trials. Even after the restoration of independence, Japanwas bound by treaty to have imprisoned Class A, B, and C war criminals serve out their full
sentences.
Ambassador Rafael de la Colina, the representative from Mexico, said the following aboutthat article in his speech to the conference: "We would also have desired that [Article 11]
not continue legalizing, with reference to the Allied War Crimes Tribunals,... an attitude
which we believe is not completely in harmony with juridical principles and is not in
consonance with the best principles of modern civilization which are enunciated in thejuridical phrase, Nullum crimen sine lege, nulla poena sine lege, a principle which inspires
the penal legislation of all cultured peoples of the world..."Ambassador Hipolito Jesus Paz, the representative from Argentina, likewise stated that,"there are some points relative to which my delegation wishes to state in a very clear
manner the interpretations under which it signs it and requests that this appear in theminutes... With regard to the courts mentioned in Article 11 of the treaty, our constitution
does not permit anybody to be punished without due process of law."
At the time of the restoration of independence, the Japanese people were still largely ofsound mind.
It was only after this that Japan surrendered all its national defense capacities, the mostimportant purpose of any nation, to the United States. As Japan became more and more
content to be America's vassal state, it lost its spirit as an independent nation.
Today, Japanese people take pride in being a "pacifist state", basking in peace by grace ofAmerica's protection.
When a person who lives opulently, thanks only to the good graces of others, flaunts his
own luxurious lifestyle, one cannot help but find that extremely distasteful.
Throughout my life, I have frequently been on the front lines of Japanese diplomacy.
Many people, not only of the left-wing but even conservatives, have told me, or, rather,have scolded me, about how "Japan ought to forge an independent foreign policy, notsimply toeing the American line."

107However, I become annoyed by the way that these same people who constantly instructed
me to "not toe the American line", have no problem with humbly accepting a constitution
which was designed for a vassal state, rather than an independent nation, and imposed by
the United States. I have always remained silent in the face of their lecturing, because I did
not think there was much point in discussing politics with those kind of people.

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Chapter 10 - What The Japanese People AccomplishedJapan's role in human history
September 2015 marked the seventieth anniversary since the Instrument of Surrender was
signed in Tokyo Bay aboard the American battleship USS Missouri.
My father Kase Toshikazu participated in the surrender ceremony accompanying
plenipotentiary Shigemitsu Mamoru.
My father was standing right beside Foreign Minister Shigemitsu as he held back his tears
and signed the Instrument of Surrender at the table placed directly in front of General
MacArthur.
The night before, his mother Katsu beckoned him to "Please sit beside me, dear."
When my father sat down, she spoke in a firm tone of voice and scolded him. "Your mother
did not raise you to become an envoy for a surrender mission. Please don't go."
My father replied, "Mother, I have no choice but to do this, or else Japan will not survive."
He told her the whole story straight and explained his reasons.
Still, Katsu was not persuaded.
"This is too much for me to bear," she whimpered as she stood. While sobbing, she
prepared a new set of undergarments for my father.
When I was in middle school, I asked my father what was going through his mind while hewas on board the USS Missouri.
At that time, my father told me, "Although Japan had been defeated in battle, we hadliberated the people of Asia from hundreds of years of oppression and enslavement. As I
stood on the deck of the USS Missouri, I knew in my heart with pride that Japan had
actually won the war, insofar as we had led Asia into a great new era of history. Shigemitsu
felt the same way."
When he was on the deck, my father noticed that seven or eight small images of theJapanese rising sun had been painted on the battleship's grey hull. Evidently, these
represented the number of kamikaze aircraft which the USS Missouri had downed.
Suddenly, he felt a surge of emotion welling up from inside him, but he knew that he could
show no tears in front of an enemy general.
"Never in my life have I had to try so hard to fight back my tears," my father recalled.

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As I grew up, I felt the same pride and sorrow that my father did the day that he stood on
the deck of the USS Missouri. These feelings have still not left me.
The impact of Asia's liberation, which Japan had won at such a high price, was soon felt on
the African continent as well. The peoples of Africa, who had been oppressed by Western
powers, achieved their independence, one after another.
Japan played a monumental role in human history. Today's world of racial equality wasforged through battles fought by Japan.
The unbreakable spirit of the Japanese people
I was in the third grade in elementary school on August 15, 1945 when Japan surrendered
to the Allies.
On October 2, my mother Sumako brought me back to Tokyo from Nagano Prefecture
where we had evacuated. Tokyo had been reduced to a field of ashes as far as the eye couldsee.
Our own home, which was located in Shinanomachi in Tokyo's Yotsuya neighborhood, wasamong those completely incinerated by the air raid of May 25.
Due to his post as Chief of the Foreign Affairs Ministry's North America Section, my father
was kept busy conducting negotiations with the US occupation army arriving in Japan. It
took him some time before he could return to the house we had rented in Shinanomachi.
The next time I saw him, I asked him, with a child's innocence, "Tokyo has been wreckedso badly, but what will happen to Japan?"My father said to me, "America can destroy Japan, but it can never break the spirit of theJapanese people." My mother also remained strong in the face of adversity. She wasthirty-two years old at the time, ten years younger than my father. She wrote the following
diary entry on September 14:"For the last twenty-three days, the newspapers have been releasing lists of war criminals
almost every day. General Tojo was ordered to present himself, and it was terrible to hearthat he tried to commit suicide and was sent to hospital. I feel pity for him as a fellow
Japanese citizen. I think that we will need to steel ourselves mentally to cope with thisincreasing pressure. A victorious nation can put a defeated nation on trial, but even the
United States cannot be the judge of a person's soul. America keeps on stridently insistingthat the Japanese people need to be re-educated, but the real problem would be if the peopleof another nation became infected with America's vain worldview. We have a strong
responsibility to exercise leadership here."
From conditional surrender to unconditional surrender110

My father returned to the Japanese Foreign Ministry in 1954 at the time of the formation of
the Hatoyama Ichiro Cabinet. He became ambassador to the United Nations and secured
Japan's admission to the UN in 1956.
Until the day he passed away in 2004, at the age of 101, my father would regularly remindme that, "Japan did not unconditionally surrender," that "The 'pacifist constitution' was notintended to bring peace to Japan," and that "The phrase 'United Nations' is a serious
misnomer."
Seventy years have passed since the end of the war, and over that time the Japanese people
have gradually deceived themselves over many key facts.
Now, even school textbooks teach that Japan "unconditionally surrendered" at the end ofWorld War II.
However, that is not true. Japan surrendered conditionally by accepting the terms of the
Potsdam Declaration.
It was only after MacArthur occupied Japan that the United States began to refer to Japan's"unconditional surrender". By then, the Japanese Army had already been disarmed, and soJapan had no choice but to accept this humiliating falsification of history by the occupation
army.
Both the occupation of the Japanese mainland by the Allied Army and the trials of Japaneseleaders by the IMTFE were clear violations of the terms of the Potsdam Declaration.
Article Seven of the Potsdam Declaration stated only that, "points in Japanese territory to
be designated by the Allies shall be occupied to secure the achievement of the basic
objectives we are here setting forth." Article Ten was limited to crimes taking place on thebattlefield, demanding only that "stern justice shall be meted out to all war criminals,
including those who have visited cruelties upon our prisoners."
Even since Japan regained its independence in 1952, the Japanese government has neverspoken a word about how its constitution was imposed by a military occupation in violationof international law.
The United Nations are the Allied Powers
There is one other big lie which the Japanese government has foisted upon its own people.
In the Japanese language, the Allied Powers who opposed Japan during World War II werecalled rengo koku, which literally means "United Nations". And yet, the name of the
postwar organization whose headquarters is located in Manhattan, New York, overlooking
the East River, was deliberately mistranslated into Japanese as kokusai rengo, which
actually means, not "United Nations", but "International Union".

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This mistranslation of the words "United Nations" as "International Union," ranks
alongside Japan's postwar constitution as the biggest factors that have warped theworldviews of Japanese citizens since the end of the war.
There is probably no country in the world with greater affection for the United Nations thanJapan. Unfortunately, Japanese people are not aware that their so-called "International
Union" was one and the same as the Allied Powers of World War II. Japan is the only
country in the world which has mistranslated the name "United Nations" as "International
Union".
The English label "United Nations" was first adopted on January 1, 1942, the year
following Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. On that day, representatives from twenty-six
countries which were at war with the Axis Powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan met in
Washington and promulgated the Declaration by United Nations.
The name came from a speech delivered at the conference by President Roosevelt, who
proposed that the Allied Powers fighting Japan and Germany be called the "United
Nations".
Japan waged war on the Allied Powers, AKA the "United Nations", for the next three years
and eight months. Thus, it was the "United Nations" Air Force which carpet bombed
Japan's cities in violation of international law and which slaughtered huge numbers of
noncombatants through dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The postwar United Nations was established following a conference in San Francisco inJune 1945 while the war was still ongoing, and participation in the war on Japan was arequirement for admission.
The UN Charter was signed by the fifty-one nations fighting Japan. Though Article 4 of the
UN Charter had stipulated that membership was "open to all other peace-loving states," theinvitation to join was extended only to those nations which had declared war on the Axis
Powers before March 1, 1945.
At no point since its creation has the United Nations ever been an instrument forinternational peace. That is why the so-called "enemy clauses" still exist today as part of the
UN Charter.
Therefore, the United Nations should rightfully be regarded as synonymous with the“Allied Powers” of World War II. The Japanese language, however, disguises this fact byreferring to the United Nations as the "International Union". The correct term, rengo koku,
appears only once in the preamble of the Japanese text of the UN Charter.

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In fact, both the Japanese Foreign Ministry and Japanese newspapers such as the Asahi
Shimbun did refer to both the Allied Powers and the postwar United Nations by the proper
term of rengo koku up to October 1945. After the end of the war, the alternative name
"International Union" was ultimately adopted in order to prevent the organization frombeing an object of popular enmity as the Allied Powers, like America, were. The Foreign
Ministry based the mistranslation "International Union" (kokusai rengo) off the Japanesename for the prewar League of Nations (kokusai renmei).
Ample monetary compensation was offered up by the Japanese government to convince the
UN to build the headquarters of the "International Union" University along downtown
Aoyama Street. Would we have still wanted to host it, if it were called "The University of
the Allied Powers"?
Likewise, a great number of well-meaning Japanese men and women have joined the"International Union" Association of Japan, which has branches across the country, butwould they be as enthusiastic about it, if it were called the "’Allied Powers’ Association ofJapan"?
It is the mistranslation "International Union" which has led so many Japanese to worship
the United Nations/Allied Powers as a temple of peace. Apart from Japan, the rest of theworld sees the UN as a place of conflict and skullduggery.
Deception through euphemism
The mistranslation of United Nations/Allied Powers as "International Union" was only oneof many linguistic contortions which came into practice after World War II.
The occupation army (senryogun in Japanese) became known as the occupation forces(shinchugun), and the "day of defeat" (haisen in Japanese) became simply "the war's end"
(shusen).
Such rephrasing of words has served to distract from the true situation.
Even now, the Japanese language uses the optimistic turn-of-phrase ohiraki, which literallymeans the opening of a meeting, to describe the time when a party ends. Until the Meiji Era,
it was unacceptable to eat four-legged animals, and so the boar’s meat was called"mountain whale," while rabbits were equated with birds.
When the Tokugawa Shogunate constructed its seat of government in Edo, modern-day
Tokyo, it established the famous red-light district of Yoshiwara. However, Yoshiwara hadoriginally been called Ashiwara, where reeds (ashi) grew thickly. Because the Japaneseword for "reed" (ashi) is a homonym of the word "evil," the superstitious shogunatechanged its name to Yoshi(“good”)wara.

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Undoubtedly, Japan's postwar veneration of the "International Union" would never havebecome so widespread if it had been correctly translated as "Allied Powers".
For the last seventy years, Japan has been twisting the meaning of very important words.
However, just as the Japanese Army used to insist on referring to "retreats" as"repositionings," such euphemisms serve only to blind us to reality.
Likewise, Japan continues to call its military a "Self-Defense Force".
When the National Diet debated legislation to broaden Japan's right to self-defense, I cameacross some men and women standing on the sidewalk in front of the Diet Members' Office
Building who were holding signs which said, "Protect Article 9!" This was a reference to
Article 9 of Japan's constitution under which Japan renounces the right to go to war.
If Article 9 is so great, I would like to see these people preach its lofty virtues to thepeoples of the Middle East and Ukraine!
Obviously, the pious pacifists carrying those signs have an unshakable faith in theinviolability of Article 9.
“The Patriotic March,” a song composed before the war in 1937, contains one line which
goes, "Our pride in Japan is an unshakable faith". This was a reference to the fact that Japan
had never been conquered by a foreign power.
Nonetheless, is Japan's constitution really something that Japanese people should beflaunting to the rest of the world as a source of pride?
Japanese people euphemistically call it a "pacifist constitution", but it is actually an unequal
treaty in the guise of a constitution, which was imposed by the US occupation in order tocompletely disarm Japan and reduce it to the status of a permanent vassal state.
Japan's "wrapper culture"
A major distinguishing characteristic of Japanese culture is its unusual obsession with theexterior or superficial side of things.
If a person graduated from the University of Tokyo, he will be labeled as a "Tokyo
University man" until he is eighty or ninety years old.
The packaging used by Takashimaya Department Stores is prized more highly than the
packaging used by Seibu Department Stores.
In Japan, the wrapping of a gift is often better than the gift itself.

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Moreover, the clothing worn by Japanese women is more lavish and expensive than that ofany other culture in the world. Japanese wedding dresses and the costumes used in kabuki
and noh plays are considerably more extravagant than the dresses worn in China by
successive empresses or in the Palace of Versailles by Marie Antoinette and the French
court.
Until very recently, when a Japanese person received imported brandy or foreign-madeJohnnie Walker Black Label, it was always packaged in a box made of fine paulownia
wood.
When Mount Fuji was registered as a World Heritage Site, the number of climbers rose
precipitously. Similarly, when Tomioka Silk Mill in Gunma Prefecture was awarded thesame label, it was deluged with tourists, even though virtually no one had bothered to visit
it until then.
This is all indicative of Japan's "wrapper culture". What is known as the Constitution ofJapan is only wrapping paper, but even so most Japanese citizens refuse to acknowledge
that the actual substance of the document underneath the wrapping is that of an unequal
treaty forced upon Japan by the United States at the point of a bayonet.
In fact, peace is not something which can be achieved through hope and prayer. Peacecomes only through the collective efforts of the people.
Why would a Japanese law book include the US Declaration of Independence?
Supporters of Article 9 often remind me about how in 1945 the people were preparing to
defend mainland Japan armed with only bamboo spears and the hope that "one hundred
million kamikaze" would make the land of the Gods invulnerable to attack. They were toldthat Japan would achieve the final victory thanks to the divine wind of the Gods.
However, I would like supporters of Article 9 to look beyond the superficial exterior of theconstitution and think about Japan's future without blinders.
They cherish Japan's constitution as a "pacifist constitution," even though it is an unequal
treaty, disguised as a constitution, which was devised with the aim of perpetually disarming
Japan so that Japan would be reduced to the status of a vassal state and unable to again posea threat to the USA. It was not imposed on Japan with Japan's best interests in mind.
I own a copy of the Japanese Compendium of Laws, released in 1972 by Yuhikaku
Publishing. The chief editor was Wagatsuma Sakae, a University of Tokyo professor.
Although it was published twenty years after Japan regained its independence, for somereason the title page of its volume on constitutional law includes the full text of the US
Declaration of Independence in both Japanese and English.

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"We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they areendowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights..."The US Declaration of Independence was drafted by Thomas Jefferson, who would become
America's third president. And yet, Jefferson was a southern planter who owned manyslaves. "All men" actually referred only to white men.
Jefferson wrote the declaration even as his black slaves were shrieking in pain fromwhippings. This is all sadly absurd.
A people who value mind over matter
Because my father worked in the Foreign Ministry under the new constitution and served as
Japan's first ambassador to the United Nations, he was not in a position to speak about the
mistranslation of "International Union" or to strongly criticize the "pacifist constitution".
It is a racial characteristic of the Japanese people that we cherish the spirit so much that we
often neglect the reality.
Because of this, the true spirit of a Japanese word like budo cannot be translated into
foreign languages, including English. The standard English translation of budo is "martial
arts," referring to a set of fighting techniques.
However, in the martial art I practice, karate, what is required is clarity of mind, and thesame is true of kendo, judo, and jodo. They do not involve any strategy or any obsession
with winning or losing a match. The Japanese word "karate" initially meant "Chinese hand"in reference to its Chinese origins, but its meaning later changed to "empty hand" inreference to the Zen Buddhist motto "emptiness is form".
In kendo, there exists the aphorism, from Miyamoto Musashi's "The Book of Five Rings,"
that "When swords are crossed it is hell, but to step forward is paradise." Within the Yagyu
school of swordsmanship, there is even one branch called the "no sword school". In
Japanese archery, pupils are taught to "aim not at your target".
Since the shape of Japanese swords was fixed in the twelfth century, no other types ofswords have existed. By contrast, European, Chinese, Indian, and Islamic civilizations all
produced a wide variety of swords, each of which was suited for a different form of combat,
in the same way that in golf one might use a driver or a type of numbered iron dependingon the shot one is making.
Recently, I have been frequently asked to explain martial arts to the many Westerners who
are fascinated by the subject. Even so, people from the West and from China find it
impossible to understand why it is so important to clear one's mind and fight without
concern for life and death or for winning or losing.

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Japanese women's clothing is more ornate and expensive than that of any other country in
the world, but here also the Japanese word kitsuke has no equivalent in any foreign
language. Japanese-English dictionaries commonly translate it simply as "garments", but it
actually implies a person's manner of bearing as much as it does the beauty of the clothing.
The emotional state of the person wearing the clothing is crucial.
Likewise, in Japanese tea ceremonies, flower arrangement, calligraphy, and incense
ceremonies, a person's state of mind is central to the art.
The Japanese spirit remains unique among all cultures on planet Earth.
John Lennon's praise for Shinto
On New Years' Day, I pay my respects at Yasukuni Shrine. I have been encouraged theselast six or seven years to see many young men and women visit the shrine.
While I'm on the subject of Yasukuni, I would like to describe John Lennon's connection to
the shrine.
John used to visit Yasukuni Shrine together with Yoko Ono, my cousin. I got to know John
after he married Yoko. The surname Ono is my mother's maiden name.
Because I was the first member of Yoko's family who he met, we hit it off right away.
I met John in New York and in Tokyo. We used to chat about rather silly things. He
mentioned to me that he saw a UFO flying over the skies of Manhattan. Once he propped
up three silver batons together and likened them to a pyramid. We put our vegetables, meat,and cigarettes underneath and joked that the flavor would be enhanced by "pyramid
power".
We also discussed religion and art. I explained to him that in World War II, Japan had been
forced by America to go to war for the sake of its own survival.
Because John and Yoko were on the frontlines of the movement against the Vietnam War,which was another instance of America illegally forcing war upon another country, John
probably saw World War II through the same prism.
John was an extremely kind man. I have never known another person with such a gentle
heart.
John had a true affinity for Japan, and he was especially fascinated by the Shinto faith.
One of the big hits John wrote and composed was the song "Imagine," which captured thehearts of young people around the world. John wrote the song together with Yoko.
However, it set off a strong backlash in the Christian world due to its denial of monotheism.

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The song contains lyrics like "Imagine there's no heaven, It's easy if you try, No hell below
us, Above us only sky" and "Nothing to kill or die for, And no religion too, Imagine all thepeople, Living life in peace."
I had told John that Shinto has no such absurd concepts as a heaven somewhere high in thesky or a hell deep within the Earth. I had explained to him that our heaven is the whole world,
including the seas, rivers, forests, and mountains. Because humans too are just one part of the
Earth, we worship nature and vow to not damage or pollute it.
I illustrated my explanation of Shinto to him by referring to Winnie the Pooh, a small bear
known to all the children of Britain.
Winnie the Pooh is the protagonist of a series of children's stories set in the forests of England
where many types of animals live. Pooh enjoys a playful existence with his friends in theforest and goes on adventures with the other animals.
There are no churches in the forest. For Pooh and his friends, the forest is their heaven, and in
the forest, all the animals are equal. It is just like a Shinto sacred grove. For Japanese people,
the animals, sea life, insects, and plants are all our friends.
John also visited Ise Grand Shrine together with Yoko.
I told John that, whereas love in Christianity is not without conditions, harmony in Japanese
Shinto surrounds us all completely. He nodded in approval.
John used to go to Japanese language school to study Japanese several times a week. Hisfavorite expression was okagesama ("thank you"), which he told me "is the most beautiful
phrase in the world. There is no other phrase quite so marvelous."
He wrote the Japanese that he was learning in Romanized Japanese in his notebook, and eachword was accompanied by an amusing doodle. I praised him for his work, and the next time I
saw him he presented me with the notebook, bound in a black leather cover and autographedwith the message "For dear cousin Hide."
I believe that "Imagine" is a song about the Shinto world.
The world today is full of unceasing bloodshed due to religious conflict. I think that if thespirit of Shinto were more widespread, people would be able to coexist peacefully with one
another.
Once, when I was giving a lecture on Japanese culture, I mentioned that John and Yoko had
visited Yasukuni Shrine, and a young lady in the audience immediately blurted out, "Thatcan't be true!"118

I responded by telling her, "I have a photo of the two of them taken at the entrance of theshrine." She gave me a displeased look and said, "This must be some sort of mistake..."The photograph was taken by the Associated Press when the two of them were entering theshrine to pay their respects. John still had long hair at that time.
The spirit of gratitude of the kamikaze
Why was it that over 10,000 kamikaze willingly sacrificed their lives for their homeland
during World War II? For a long time, I have been searching for the answer. More than
10,000 perished if we add together all suicide attacks carried out by aircraft pilots, boat andsubmarine crew, and paratroopers.
The Japanese expressions used to express gratitude before and after a meal are, respectively,
itadakimasu and gochisosama, which literally mean "I humbly accept" and "That was a greatmeal". These words have no equivalents in any foreign language.
In neighboring Korea, before a meal they say chal mŏk ket sŭm nida, which literally means"I shall eat sufficiently", whereas in China they say kaishi chifan, which literally means"Now I will eat". After a meal Koreans say chal mŏ gŏt sŭm nida, and once sated theChinese say haochi fanle, both of which mean "I ate sufficiently."
Europeans and Americans start a meal with the French expression, bon appétit, and end bysaying "I enjoyed it."
Pious Christians would instead start their meals with a short prayer of gratitude to the
Almighty God. However, they wouldn't bother to give any thanks either to the plants,
animals, and sea life they were about to consume, or to nature, their ancestors, and thepeople around them.
By contrast, Japan is a culture where we continually express gratitude to one another. We
greet one another with osewa ni narimasu ("Thank you for your support"), even when wearen't actually asking for anything specific.
Christianity is called the "religion of love", but Christian love is not love as Japanesepeople normally understand the concept.
Christianity was born from Judaism where if a person loves God, then God reciprocatesthat love. Thus, it is a love that comes with conditions. This agreement is referred to as the"Covenant with God".
The Christian Bible is comprised of two holy books, the Old Testament and the New
Testament. The Old Testament, considered by Christians to be the "Old Covenant" with
God, is the only one used in Judaism, whereas the New Testament, considered by

119Christians to be the "New Covenant" with God, is the holy book composed after the birth ofJesus Christ.
This Covenant with God is the most fundamental tenet of Christianity. In the Old
Testament, the Jews are referred to as "the people of the Covenant". Christianity is
inclusive to all people, and those who subscribe to the faith have each made a personalcommitment to God. Islam too is a covenant-based religion, and Muslims recognize theholy books of Christianity and Judaism alongside their own holy book, the Quran.
My heart feels warmest, not when my wife tells me that she loves me, but when she says
those two beautiful words, "Thank you".
My spirit is nourished each time that I express my gratitude to nature, to the Gods, to myancestors, to my parents, and to my neighbors. Our souls exist only to appreciate others.
The faith of the Japanese people is based upon the spirit of gratitude.
In Japan, we understand that each individual is kept alive only thanks to all other things
around him, and so our culture emphasizes the gratitude we feel towards others. We are
grateful, not to any one specific object, but rather to everything in our lives, including
nature, the Gods, our parents, our ancestors, our land, and our country. Until the end ofWorld War II, this list was condensed into words like "Emperor" and "nation".
I believe that the kamikaze, a phenomena which have never been seen in any other country
or anywhere else in world history, represent the pure manifestation of this spirit ofgratitude.
The emotional sensitivity of the Japanese people
There are some people who abhor Yasukuni Shrine. I have never managed to understand
why they are so unable to love their own country or the spirits of those soldiers who gaveup their lives for it.
Out of all the many countries in the world, only Japan boasts an imperial dynasty which has
survived for 125 generations. The Imperial House is what makes Japan Japan.
Why is it that the Emperor has been Japan's most venerated and esteemed figure ever since
the foundation of the Japanese state?
Shinto is an animistic faith which believes that spirits reside within all things. Among all
the world's developed countries, only Japan adheres to an animistic faith. Moreover, theShinto faith and the Imperial House share the same roots.

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Japanese people have believed in the ubiquitous nature of the spirits since ancient times, abelief which sprang from pure intuition. The Japanese knew intuitively that everything in
the universe was sacred.
Nevertheless, for a long time these beliefs had no name. The word "Shinto" entered theJapanese language relatively recently. It first appeared in the Nihon Shoki, the second
oldest work of Japanese history, which was completed in AD 720.
Shinto has existed for as long as Japan has existed, but the word "Shinto" came into use
only after the introduction of Buddhism in order to distinguish the two.
Rational modes of thinking were imported to Japan from continental China alongside
Buddhism.
Shinto is based on spiritual intuition, and therefore has no connection to the religions which
ask their followers to exercise their minds. This is the reason why Shinto, unlike Buddhism
and the other continental import of Confucianism, still uses no sacred scripture.
Buddhism and Confucianism proved very useful as the Japanese nation developed.
Buddhism and Shintoism were not in conflict with one another, but rather drew lessons
from one another and intermixed.
Whereas reason ultimately supplanted intuition in China, Europe, and the Middle East, inJapan, Shinto lost none of its strength.
The Emperors have reigned as spiritual sovereigns for 125 generations, and under theirguidance, Shinto too has endured to the present day.
And yet, in the West, religious scholars deem rational monotheism to be a trait of "maturereligions", and they look down on animism as being "primitive religion".
In China, Europe, and the Middle East, people fought endlessly over their own sound or
unsound rationalizations. Each side held fast to their own ideals of good and evil, whichwere constructed on the basis of their own ways of reasoning, and they competed for power.
Dynasties rose and fell with great frequency.
Because Japanese people have valued intuition above all, our society has never been ruledby rationalism.
In Japan, no person would decide on his or her own what is good and what is evil. Japanesepeople make judgments based on our emotional sensitivity to what is pure and beautiful,and to what is impure and unsightly.
A society where gods and men are equal

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Amaterasu is the chief deity in Shinto, but she is not an omnipotent and all-powerfulSupreme Being like the God of the Abrahamic religions or the Chinese Lord of Heaven.
Amaterasu did not create the universe. According to the Kojiki, the oldest work of Japanese
history which was completed in AD 712, the universe created itself through its own power
without requiring the intervention of the gods.
In Chinese mythology, mankind was created by a half-snake goddess. The humans who she
crafted with great care became the governing elite of the Earth, while the humans who shethrew together in a rough manner became the common people.
To this day, China is a hierarchical, class-based society. In Europe too, strong classdistinctions continue to exist. In the United States, discrimination against
African-Americans remains a major social problem.
On the other hand, Japan has developed as an egalitarian society. Both we on Earth and thegods above are all equally kings in our own right.
What if Roosevelt had been assassinated?
The course of history can seem incredible when examined retrospectively.
Franklin Roosevelt was elected to office in the presidential election of 1932. Currently, theinauguration ceremony for a new president takes place in the January following the election,
but at the time it was held two months later in March.
On February 15, 1933, Roosevelt went to Miami, Florida, for a vacation as president-elect.
That evening, a welcoming party was held in Bayfront Park in honor of the incoming
president.
Over seven thousand citizens had crowded into the park's outdoor amphitheater.
The mayor of Chicago, Anton Cermak, came to the reception from Chicago to meet
Roosevelt, who was standing beside him at that moment.
Roosevelt gave a short speech, and as he was handing the microphone over to the mayor of
Miami, five shots rang out.
Giuseppe Zangara, a bricklayer and anarchist, shot at Roosevelt with a .32-caliber revolver
at a distance of ten meters. By some miracle, the bullets missed Roosevelt and hit Cermak
in the chest.
With his last breaths, Cermak uttered to Roosevelt, "Mr. President, I'm glad it was me
instead of you." Cermak was rushed to hospital, but did not survive.

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If Zangara had fatally shot Roosevelt instead, the next month Vice President-Elect John
Nance Garner would have taken office as the thirty-second president of the United States.
Garner was a neutralist who fervently believed that the United States should not become
entangled in overseas wars.
If Roosevelt was assassinated and Garner became president, I am fairly certain that the war
between the United States and Japan would never have happened.
To Conclude
For humankind, the greatest event of the twentieth century was the disappearance of the"color line," which measured the worth of humans and divided them based on the color of
their skin.
Even now, seventy years after the end of the war, Washington demands that Japan adhere
to its war apology statements, the Murayama Statement and the Kono Statement, and that it
continually express remorse over its actions during World War II.
Russia is at least able to claim justice for having overthrown Nazi Germany in World War
II. Like Russia, China has also become a pariah due to its threats against neighboring
countries. Though the People's Republic of China was not actually one of the victor powers,
even China can at least dishonestly claim justice for having brought militaristic Japan toheel.
And what about the United States? The United States is trying to Americanize the world, all
the while flaunting its infallibility and portraying itself as the most righteous nation on theface of the Earth.
America too wants to prove that its cause during World War II was just. Nonetheless,America is very wrong to insist that only Japan need make amends for its actions during thewar.
Shouldn't America admit that it was wrong to have forced the war upon Japan? Japan wasfighting a just war purely for the sake of its own survival.
When Prime Minister Abe Shinzo referred to the Japan Self-Defense Forces as an "army",
he was lambasted in the Diet.
On July 31, 1952, three months after Japan regained its independence, Prime Minister
Yoshida Shigeru told the Diet that, "It is within our mandate that this force form thefoundation of a new national army." Even so, no one in the Diet raised a word of objection.

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On November 3 of the next year, Yoshida told the House of Representatives Budget
Committee that, "The Self-Defense Forces are an army without the capacity to make war."
Again, the opposition parties never found any fault with his comment.
However, when a female Diet member recently uttered the prewar phrase hakko ichiu(world brotherhood), she too was harangued by her colleagues in the Diet.
Whenever did the Diet of Japan become the National Assembly of South Korea, whereanti-Japanese attacks are a daily routine?
The phrase hakko ichiu comes from the Nihon Shoki. Are people saying that the Nihon
Shoki, one of the oldest works of Japanese history, is a book that the Japanese should beashamed of?
On March 8, 1956, Foreign Minister Shigemitsu Mamoru, who was serving in the cabinetof Prime Minister Hatoyama Ichiro, stated to the House of Councilors’ Budget Committee
that, "Japan's actions during World War II contributed to the independence of the nations ofSoutheast Asia."
On January 24, 1974, Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei remarked that, "Japan's rule over the
Korean Peninsula was beneficial to the Korean people." No one in the Diet or anywhere
else in Japan objected to what he had said.
The more the memory of the war faded away, the more the nation's sanity faded as well.
The Emperor and Empress visited Palau in April, 2015, and though they were able to stayaboard a Japan Coast Guard patrol boat, why did not Japan send escort from the Maritime
Self-Defense Force, designated as the Imperial Flagship?
The Air Self-Defense Force flies the "Prime Minister's Flag" when the prime minister isaboard, but there is no "Emperor's Flag". If there is a flag for the prime minister, then why
can't there be one for the emperor?
That is a question I can answer. It is because Japan is not a country. Many irresponsible
Japanese people treasure the "pacifist constitution," but it should properly be called theconstitution of a vassal state. The use of the term "self-defense force" to mean "army" andthe use of the term "pacifism" to effectively mean "submission" clearly reflect the mentalityof a fallen nation.
Upon the publication of this book, I would like to express my sincerest gratitude to Mr.
Watanabe Yuki of the publishing firm KK Bestsellers for his support.
-Kase Hideaki

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